


Bring a Torch

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Christmas, Fluff, Found Families, Gen, bad family situations, ice storm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-03 15:21:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 28,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1072025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's Winter Break and so, of course, all the students are home with their families, celebrating the holidays.  Except for the ones that can't.  Some aren't able to travel home to be with their families; others wouldn't spend the holiday with their families if you paid them a million dollars.  Some aren't welcome at home anymore.  Some have no home to go to.</p><p>A handful of these students connect when an ice storm knocks out the power.  And they find that they are not as alone as they thought.</p><p>An origin story of sorts for the Amis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Pushover

_Christmas Eve, 3:30 pm_

“Sorry, man, there’s nothing I can do.  It’s an old car, so I have to call around to scrap yards to find the part, and then they have to ship them in.  And I only have a coupl-a guys in the shop this week, so . . . yeah, if we’re lucky we can maybe get it done by New Year’s.”

Bossuet nodded.  “Okay, sure”

“If it had happened earlier, maybe we could’a done something, but at three o’clock on Christmas Eve?  It’s kind of out for the whole holiday.”

He nodded again.  “Yeah, I understand.  So can I leave it here over the week?”

The mechanic nodded eagerly, obviously relieved that the stranded traveler wasn’t going to blow up in his face.  “Of course.  That really sucks, man, it breaking down just when you were on your way out of town.”

“It does,” Bossuet agreed.  “But I’m just glad it happened when I was still in town instead of two hours from now, in the middle of nowhere, at night.”

“Wow, yeah, that would really suck.  Hey listen, you need a ride home?  It’s the least we can do, since we can’t get your car back to you for a week.”

Bossuet opened his mouth to say yes, please, that would be great--but then the door opened behind him and a woman bustled in with two kids in tow and a harried look on her face.  This was at least the tenth person to come in in the forty minutes he’d been waiting to find out why smoke was pouring out from under his hood, and the shop would be open for another three hours still.  The two poor guys still working on Christmas Eve didn’t need another thing on their plates.

“No, I’m fine.  It’s just around the corner.”

“Okay, man, if you’re sure.”  The mechanic hesitated, but Bossuet could see the relief in the man’s lined face, and it just confirmed his decision.

“Definitely.  I’ll just go grab a couple things from the trunk on my way out.  Hey, have a great Christmas.”

“You too,” the man called after him as Bossuet ducked out into the rainy evening.

He’d packed the way he always did--in laundry baskets and garbage bags, and his clothes were spilled across the backseat haphazardly, mixed in with books and wrapped presents and CD cases.  He gathered up an armload of likely-looking T-shirts and sweaters and jeans and stuffed them in his backpack around his laptop, then reached into the front seat for a couple of CDs and his cell phone charger.  He changed into his snow boots and shoved the shoes he’d been wearing in the top of the bag, and there was just enough room left for the bag of pretzels that was supposed to be his snack for the eleven-hour drive.  He zipped up the bag, pulled his hood up over his head, gritted his teeth, and stepped out into the sleet.

It was a miserable night to be out in, and the college campus wasn’t technically just around the corner.  It was nearly a mile away, in point of fact, and on a bus route that didn’t pass through this part of the city.  He could’ve taken a bus to the central hub and then caught the number 8 bus back out to campus, but that would’ve taken nearly an hour anyway, and involved a good deal of standing at bus stops, and in the end it seemed like he might as well just walk.

It was already starting to get dark, even though it wasn’t quite four, but with the heavy storm clouds overhead, it had never really felt like daylight all day.  The lamppost decorations glowed valiantly in the gloom--candy canes and bells and trumpets made from red and gold garland and colored lights--but in the rain, the city looked more like November than Christmas Eve.  There had been snow earlier in the week, but now what little remained had been battered into slush by the relentless rain; cars splattered the stuff on Bossuet’s legs as he trudged across the town.

When he got back to his dorm, his teeth were chattering in his head and he was strongly regretting leaving his good ski mittens in the backseat somewhere under the clothes.  His dorm room was dark; his roommate had left earlier that morning.  He let himself in, turned the heat back up, and tossed his backpack in the corner by his desk.  Hands shaking, he pulled a towel down from the top shelf of his closet and hurried to the bathroom for a hot shower.

When he got back, he pulled on a pair of sweatpants, hung up his coat so it could dry properly.  And finally, he called his mother.

“Hi, Mom . . . I have some bad news.  No--no, nothing like that.  I’m fine.  I’m still at school.  But . . . well, I’m going to have to stay here over break.”

Of course, she was disappointed.  But she took the news that her son would not be home for Christmas without crying--and, to his relief, without suggesting any crazy plans of buying a last-minute train ticket that neither of them could afford (and that would deposit at a station that was still four hours from home, in the late afternoon of Christmas day at best).  They chatted for a while longer, then said goodbye, his mother promising to call the next day and pass him around to his sisters and the Clarks (the older couple up the hollow who always spent the holidays with the family lately) so it would be like he was there with them.

Not five minutes after he’d gotten off the phone with his mother, it rang again.  Glancing at the name on the screen, Bossuet knew exactly how the conversation would go.

“Hi, Kyle, what’s up?”

“Hey, Bossuet . . .  Listen, I know it’s last minute, but I was wondering if there was any way you might possibly be able to cover for me at work tomorrow?  I just came down with this stomach thing, it's like, really nasty, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it in tomorrow.”

Kyle wasn’t really sick--Bossuet wasn’t that oblivious.  The kid had been side-eyeing the schedule for weeks and dropping comments about how great it was he’d be making time and a half for working the holiday and how he couldn’t believe everyone didn’t want to work Christmas.  He wasn’t fooling anybody.  But at the same time . . . Kyle had a family to spend Christmas with--even if he was still in high school and therefore could see them any time and, also therefore, had no appreciation for the fact--and Bossuet had nothing better to do.

“Sure, I can cover for you.  You start at 8?”

It was looking like he had plans for Christmas after all.


	2. The Runaway

_Christmas Eve, 8:35 pm_

The bus station was noisy with the chaos of last-minute holiday travels--people yelling at their kids, running across the lobby to catch their bus, arguing at the ticket window.  Other people slept on the benches, draped over backpacks and battered suitcases, or paced back and forth between the vending machines and the TVs that droned out the latest news from the Middle East underneath the rest of the noise.  The bus for “Washington D.C. -- Richmond -- Charlotte -- Atlanta” was now forty-five minutes late, and its bloated line filled half the lobby, the travelers propped up on suitcases or shifting their bags restlessly from one hip to the other.

Eponine stood as far out of the way of it all as she could, pressed back into a corner beside a broken coat rack, her arms crossed over her chest as she leaned against the wall.  Water dripped from her coat to pool on the dirty floor around her numb feet.  Her headphones were in her ears, even though her old mp3 player had finally quit on her a few weeks earlier.  She glared dully at the crowd of holiday travelers and tried to catch the scratchy announcements over their stressed, excited chatter.

With the storm coming in, all the busses were running late, and it was 9:00 before the bus Eponine was waiting for came in.  The southbound bus had just arrived and the sprawling line had just gathered itself up and begun its ponderous inch toward door 7 when the crackly loudspeaker announced that the bus from Pittsburgh had arrived.  Eponine straightened and looked up, but didn’t move away from her wall.  People started streaming in through door 4, all of them just as rumpled and with as deep shadows of exhaustion in their faces as the ones waiting in the lobby.  

The skinny, dark-haired girl was almost the last one through door 4--she must have been sitting in the very back of the bus.  She walked inside and paused by the first set of benches, scanning the sides of the room.  Her eyes met Eponine’s and she nodded and headed over.

“Hey.”  Her eyes were dark with too much smudged eyeliner and she was pretending she wasn’t cold.  She was wearing the same jacket she’d worn last winter, the one that used to belong to their cousin.  Her only luggage was a limp blue backpack slung over one shoulder.

“Hey.”  Face to face with her sister, Eponine felt all the emotions that went along with “home” trembling through her.  She tried not to let it show.  “Ready to go?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s fucking miserable out,” Eponine warned her as they made their way upstairs toward the street exit.  “You bring a hat?”  Azelma just shrugged, and Eponine pulled off her own hat and handed it to her, putting up the hood of her coat.

The icy rain was still coming down steadily, although now it was mixed with something halfway in between sleet and snow.  There were nasty ice crystals in it that stung Eponine’s cheeks as she sloshed through the puddles and reminded herself that she was an adult, walking through the city where she lived, to the room she rented with her own money--or at least with student loans that were in her name and no one else’s.  There was no reason for this swelling feeling of precariousness..  

But her sneakers were soaked with slushy water and her hair plastered against her face, and with her little sister trudging beside her, she was eight years old again, stumbling through the frozen streets of a strange midwest town with Azelma trailing half a pace behind her, in search of whatever hotel their parents had gone to after leaving them at the gas station.  She’d had no idea why they’d done it; the girls had been using the bathroom and when they’d come out, their car was gone--no warning beforehand or indication of why left behind.  They waited two hours and then Eponine picked a direction and started walking, looking out for hotels or a rusty maroon Ford, unsure of what reception they’d get if they did find their parents, neither of them willing to voice their fears, to admit that anything about this wasn’t normal and expected.  

With the memory of that awful night (it had taken them hours to find the right motel, and when they did tiptoe, shivering, up to the half-open door, their parents barely glanced at them) came others.  Sitting in the trailer in darkness after the electric had been cut off and not knowing when their parents would be back or who they would blame for the darkness and the cold.  Carrying a baby Gav (half Eponine’s own size, even with him small for his age) across town in the rain when no one picked them up from after-school club.  Walking home from work at 2 am at age 14 to find her father sitting in front of the TV in his boxers, the truck sitting idle in the driveway.  No matter how hard she tried to tamp down the lid on all those experiences, they were always there--just under the surface--whispering soundlessly to her, poisoning her present with the residue of her past.

How had she believed she could just leave it all behind her?

The dorm was almost entirely dark when they reached it--a couple of windows on the top floor were lit up, and another handful on the other wing of the building.  The hallway lights were on, of course, cold and white and unnatural-looking with the whole hall so closed-up and dead.  Eponine led the way to her room and unlocked the door in silence, fumbling with the keys with numb fingers.

Azelma stood in the center of the room and looked around appraisingly.  If it were anyone else, Eponine’s cheeks would’ve burned with shame as they saw her threadbare Goodwill comforter, the fraying towel, the pile of notebooks made from scrap paper from the recycling bins of the campus’s copier rooms.  But Eponine knew what Azelma was seeing: A bed.  A towel.  A desk lamp.  A pillow.  None of it anything she would recognize from their parents’ house--which meant: all of it bought with Eponine’s own damn money.

Azelma’s eyes flicked to the roommates' beds, both of them stripped bare, and the corner of her mouth quirked down.

“They took their stuff home to wash it,” Eponine told her.  “You’ll have to share with me.”

Azelma shrugged.  “Whatever.”  She dropped her backpack by the corner of Eponine’s bed and unzipped her coat.  “Got a sweatshirt?”

Eponine opened a dresser drawer and handed her a hoodie--and, glancing at her legs, a pair of sweatpants.  She changed into dry clothes herself, then turned toward the shelf that served as her kitchen.  The microwave belonged to one of her roommates, but of course they hadn’t taken that home with them.  “You eat?”

“Nah.”

“I figured you wouldn’t--I didn’t either yet.  We have . . . Ramen.  And soup, but I figured I’d save that for Christmas.”  She hesitated, her hand hovering over the pink plastic packaging.  Her teeth were still clattering in her ears, in spite of the dry clothes, and nothing sounded more heavenly at that moment than a bowl of soup.  “Aw, fuck it, I’m making the soup.”

They ate in near silence, their plastic spoons clicking against their bowls.  Eponine broke the silence just once, to ask about Gavroche.

“I haven’t really heard from him,” Azelma said.   _It’s probably for the best,_ Eponine thought.   _The more distance he puts between himself and the rest of this family, the better._  Gavroche had, at twelve years old, made the decision to get out, and then made it happen--somehow he’d ended up with a permanent invitation to stay with a distant aunt and uncle down in North Carolina.  

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Eponine answered.  And she was.  Gavroche had always had a resourcefulness, a drive, that his older sisters lacked.  Maybe it was because he’d had to take care of himself from the beginning, while the other two were dumped into it abruptly, after six and four years of relatively normal life, when things suddenly started to get bad.  Whatever the reason, Gavroche had had the strength to recognize a poisonous situation and get himself out of it; the best the older girls had managed to do was wait it out.

After dinner, Eponine washed the dishes in the bathroom sink; she came back to find Azelma clicking through channels on the little nine-inch TV the other roommate had brought.  They watched half an hour of some old fuzzy black-and-white Christmas movie, then Eponine got up, saying she was going to bed.

They brushed their teeth in silence.  Washed their faces with the liquid hand soap from the bathroom dispensers.  Traded sweatshirts for faded old T-shirts.  Eponine turned off the light and crawled into the narrow bed beside her sister.  Yellow light from the streetlamps outside streamed over the wall, dimpled with raindrops running slowly down the pane.

If this were a movie, maybe like the feel-good holiday special they’d just been watching, now would be the time when Azelma would quietly murmur her thanks to her big sister for letting her come spend Christmas with her, for offering her an escape from their parents’ house.  And Eponine, the loving older sister, would reply that she would never have dreamed of letting her little sister spend the holidays in that place alone, without either of her siblings.  They would embrace, and maybe cry a little, and tell each other how much they loved each other and how grateful they were for each other.

But it wasn’t a movie.  If she were honest about it, Eponine didn’t really want Azelma there--and she guessed Azelma could tell (and probably didn’t really want to be there either).  They weren’t close.  Nobody could be close, not with the way things were in their house when they were kids.  The food they had stolen from each other, the times they’d told on the other to protect themselves, the hunger and fear and pain that infused so many of their shared memories--those things were still there between them.  And too much of home came along with Azelma, breaking down the mental distance Eponine had carefully built up between her childhood and her new life.  It was uncomfortable having Azelma there, as she’d known it would be.

And it was only for a week.  Azelma would stay with Eponine over the Christmas break, and for those eight days be out of their parent’s house--but she was just sixteen, and she didn’t have the guts Gavroche had to run away entirely.  She would go back on New Year’s day, and for the rest of the school year things would be just as they always were.  (And in the summer . . . ?  Eponine hadn’t thought that far.  Not yet.)  In the face of a whole year, eight days were basically meaningless.

But for all of that, it was still true that Eponine couldn’t let her sister spend Christmas at home.  And if this was the only alternative, this was what they’d do.


	3. The Apostate

_Christmas Eve, 10:48 pm_

It was still sleeting when Bahorel finally found a parking spot.  He turned up the collar of his coat as he hurried along the sidewalk, hunching his shoulders against the icy rain that trickled down the back of his neck.  As a big guy, he usually wasn’t bothered by cold--his internal thermostat ran hot, so he could go until well into winter before even bringing out his heavy coat--but even he was shivering when he finally got to the church.

Inside, though, it was already warm with the combined heat of hundreds of bodies.  Bahorel scanned the pews for an empty seat, but the place was so full he decided to leave them for people who needed them more.  After all, an old couple could easily make themselves comfortable in the amount of space he’d take up by himself.  He found a spot to stand along the wall about halfway toward the front of the church, right in the center of the light and the music and everything.  (In all honesty, part of the reason he picked that particular spot was that it was right beneath the station of the cross entitled “The Stripping,” which had been hilarious when he was fifteen--and was no less so now.)

The organist was playing carols to keep the waiting parishioners happy until the mass proper started, and Bahorel leaned against the stone wall and listened and looked around at the people.  Older people sat patiently in the most fantastic outfits (one older fellow was wearing a three-piece suit in bright red-and-green plaid), nodding along with the music or eyes closed in contemplation.  A cluster of white-robed chorists scuffled in the back before being herded away to the choir loft by a middle-aged woman with a harried look.  Little kids sat with their parents, all scrubbed and combed and dressed up in their sparkliest, velvetiest finery; some of them were droopy-eyed with sleepiness, others practically vibrated with their excitement over the presents that waited for them at home.  Families filled up whole pews with identical blue eyes or the same messy red-brown hair.

This wasn’t the church he’d grown up in--it was a good deal bigger than his church, for one thing, and he didn’t know the people who crowded the pews and were quickly filling up the side aisles--but there was still something deeply familiar about it.  Maybe it was the music that filled the air; maybe it was the shape of the building and the similar style of decoration.  Maybe it was the flickering candlelight that gave a gilded, glowing quality to everything in the room.

Bahorel leaned back against the wall contentedly, shoving his hands deep into his coat pockets.  His left hand found something stiff and unexpected at the bottom of the deep pocket, .  He pulled the thing out, wondering what it was--but the minute he saw the red envelope, he remembered.  Of course.

There was still ten minutes before the service started, so he opened the envelope again.  The card inside, a little beat up from spending several days in the pocket, bore a blurry painting of a brilliant star in a dark blue sky, its light reflected back from a little stable where a few brightly-clothed figures were bending over a manger together.  Bahorel flipped it open; the text read “Wishing you God’s peace this Christmas day.”  Underneath, a few lines scrawled in dark blue pen.  “Adrien -- Thinking of you as always but especially now.  Hope you have a good Christmas, call me any time if you need anything.  -- David.”

His parents hadn’t sent a card.

Bahorel could read between the lines of his older brother’s message:   _Mom and Dad are still pretending you never happened.  I wish I could do something about that.  Sorry._  He was grateful for the card, for the affirmation that David at least still considered him his brother.  But it did serve to highlight the contact that was missing from the other members of his family.

Christmas must be weird at home these days, he thought, with the O missing from the N-O-E-L stocking set (if they were still doing stockings; his sisters were both teenagers now that Ariana had turned thirteen, and maybe his mom had finally decided they were all old enough to retire that tradition).  He wondered who had put the star on the top of the Christmas tree that year (it had been Bahorel’s job ever since he’d hit his growth spurt at fourteen).  He wondered if they still talked about These Issues or if David, after a year of throwing out pro-gay comments at every family gathering to no apparent effect, had given up trying to change their parents’ iron-forged convictions by direct frontal assault, in favor of a long-term attrition strategy and an avoidance of bridge-burning.  He wondered whether they’d hung the giant Christmas-light star he’d made in eighth grade.

It had been three years since he’d been home, and the one thing he knew for certain was that right now--at 10:58 on December 24--his family was at midnight mass.

The organ stopped and the church fell silent--a loud silence full of whispering and shuffling feet and bulletins crinkling and the thin pages of hymnals rustling as people found their places.  And then the music burst out from the organ, huge and wall-shaking, and the congregation surged to its feet as the choir began to sing the familiar words of the first Christmas hymn of the year _(Oh come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant!)_.  Incense filled the air, mingling with the music, and Bahorel closed his eyes and leaned against the stone wall and drank it all in.  And when the priest read the familiar words of the Gospel reading _(And she gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.)_ , he could almost imagine--just for a minute--that he was home.


	4. The Failure

_Christmas, 3:12 am_

It was 3 am, and Grantaire couldn’t sleep.  Not that 3 am was really that late--he was in college, after all.  But it was also winter break, and he was alone on campus, and you could only watch so many illegally downloaded episodes of Breaking Bad before you got bored and went to bed for lack of anything better to do.  Grantaire was okay at being alone, but he didn’t thrive on it like some of his art major friends did, exploding with creative ideas and exciting plans when left to their own thoughts.  He just chugged along steadily under his own momentum for a while before gradually slowing down and finally stopping.  So, alone on his hallway--possibly in his building?--he had fallen into a pattern, as he did most breaks, of going to sleep pretty early--often before midnight, even.

But it didn’t mean that he stayed asleep.  Worn out from a day of doing nothing while the consciousness of the impending holiday crept up on him, he’d hit the pillow around ten thirty.  And around one thirty, his eyes had--for no apparent reason--snapped back open, leaving him lying there absolutely awake for absolutely no reason.

For a long time, he clung to the pretense that he wasn’t really awake, not all the way, that he had just opened his eyes for a second and now that he had closed them again he was well on his way back to sleep.  But there is nothing relaxing about lying in a dark room with the knowledge that you should be sleeping but you can’t.

He flipped his pillow over for the hundredth time and rolled over to stare at the clock.  2:51.  It hit him then that he'd spent this very night lying sleepless in bed every year throughout his childhood.  Because it was Christmas Eve—well, Christmas, really, now that it was past midnight—and as a little boy he'd always spent this night curled up under his comforters, eyes squeezed tight shut, trying so desperately to sleep in order to get to the stockings and presents and candy that he ended up keeping himself away for long, agonizing hours.

But what a different kind of insomnia this was.  As a child, as anxious as he was for Christmas, he still relished the sleeplessness, because it was a part of the expectation and excitement. _Christmas is coming.  Christmas is almost here._  Now it was an all too familiar feeling, a beast that dragged him down and sucked the energy out of him even as it refused to let him rest, and the thoughts that spun through his mind were of a very different kind.  Memories of past times, large and small, when he had fucked up (and the smallest, stupidest ones were somehow the hardest to let go).  Intrusive thoughts about even bigger ways he could fuck up in the future.  A droning, ominous voice that warned that things would always be like this, that all his life would just be a process of acquiring more and bigger fuckups to keep him awake at night.  Feelings he couldn't pin down at all, just dragging feelings of unhappiness that he couldn't fight because he could put no reason to them.

Unable to stop his brain from obsessing, Grantaire decided he might as well get up and be useful.  But of course, the minute he thought that, all his restless energy was gone and where a moment before he wanted nothing more than to be out of that damn bed, now it was all he could do to drag himself out of it.

He stumbled out into the hallway, squinting against the florescent lights—it felt very weird to come out of his room and find the place still all lit up, even though it was only him there—and shuffled down to the bathroom.  As he brushed the gross sleep taste out of his mouth, staring at his bleary-eyed reflection, he decided he should at least try to work on a painting.  He had an Incomplete in Acrylic Methods hanging over his head and the professor had said if he finished up the last two assignments over break he could change it to just-barely-passing.  He wasn't sure why she'd offered; it wasn't like Grantaire deserved it.  He'd been a terrible student all semester, barely managing to show up for one or two lectures a month out of eight, his written assignments misspelled, unorganized paragraphs spotted with coffee.  To all appearances, he hadn't even begun to make an effort.

The truth was, he'd actually tried for that class, more than for anything else he'd taken all semester.  It was just, that was what trying looked like from Grantaire.

Which was the reason he was on academic probation for the next semester and going to drop out at the end of the year when he failed all those classes as well.  It wasn't that he was planning on it—he just knew it was inevitable because he knew himself.  He should just drop out then, give everyone around him a break from the gigantic fuck-up that was his academic career, but . . . well, he had another painting class next semester with the same professor as Acrylics, and he kind of wanted to stay and at least get that in before he left.

And that—the fact that he was going to be spending all of the next semester studying under this professor again—was a good reason to actually try to complete the previous semester's work, even if it was academically meaningless since he was going to drop out anyway.

Getting back to his room, Grantaire flipped on the lights and pulled his paints from the desk drawer where he'd dumped them after the last time he tried to paint.  He wouldn’t think about that last session, how badly it had gone, how he--no.  He squeezed out a big dollop of pthalo green; his palette was still smeared with the dried remains of previous painting sessions, but he knew he didn’t have the momentum to go all the way back to the bathroom again to rinse it off, so he was going to make do with it as it was.

He started out with green, without anything real in mind to paint but because green was a good color, strong enough to grab his interest and help him focus on the colors he was putting down on the canvas but not so overpowering that it would take over anything he painted on top of it.  As he filled the canvas with color, he began to fall into his painting mindset, where the process of putting down the paint, getting the brushes to do what he wanted, paying attention to the color and really seeing what it was doing, all filled his mind up, pushing aside the anxiety and the intrusive thoughts and everything that wore him ragged most of the time.

It didn’t work all the time.  It didn’t work very often, as a matter of fact, especially lately--but tonight it was working, and Grantaire was going to relish the hour of relief.

A Christmas scene, he decided.  Why not, it was fitting.  And the green-blue he was painting over the background would give the whole thing a warm bluish glaze.  The barn, first, with strong strokes of dark brown laying out the beams, a sturdy framework for--no, on second thought, he’d make the lines slightly off, the verticals imperceptibly canted, the horizontals not quite parallel.  The roof of ragged thatch, next, the scatter of straw on the floor.  The manger had to be central to the piece, and he painted it next, then the Christ child tucked in among the hay as was traditional.  A touch of rust on the temples, the suggestion of eyebrows, the line of the lips.  Next, the parents, standing over it, faces blank with awe.  A small brush--no, the small brushes were gone, he didn’t know what had happened to them, he used the jagged end of the one that had splintered instead--for the glint of light on the eyes.  No animals or shepherds or kings, he decided.  They would distract from the main figures in the painting, and anyway there wasn’t space for them.  One more thing, the star overhead, you had to have a star and he needed some strong warm colors to balance out the green undertone, which had come out stronger than he’d expected it to--so a star, bright orange-red light falling down

Grantaire turned away from the painting, kneading his hands to work the stiffness out of his fingers (he hadn’t noticed it while he was working).  He waited a few minutes before looking back, distancing himself from the work, transitioning from seeing like an artist to seeing like a critic.  He walked to the window and looked out at the snow--it had been sleet when he went to sleep, but now it was falling in fast, thick flakes that clouded the air under the streetlights and reflected the orange light around over everything, like a wash of cadmium orange over the world.  He went to the mini-fridge for a bottle of beer, cracked it open, and took a long drink.  He’d been thirstier than he’d realized.  Finally, he turned back to the painting.

It was perhaps the most profane thing he’d ever painted.  The Christ child wore the face of a monster, the shadows on his face forming a snarl and horns.  His parents were automatons with lidded eyes and zombie grins on their faces.  The reds and oranges where the starlight gleamed on thatch and clothes turned the scene into a hellish nightmare of flames.  The stable around them burned and Mary and Joseph just gazed into the manger, hypnotized by the monster they’d produced.  

He’d meant it to be subversive--the stable just a _little_ bit wrong, the serenity on the parent’s face just a _little_ too blank.  He’d gone a lot farther without intending to.

Which was strange, because he didn’t actually hate religion.  Or rather, he did, he supposed, but not any more than anything else.  He didn’t believe in it, and he knew its effects on the world had been about 80% really shitty--but you could say the same of governments and homophobia and racism and sexism and communism and nationalism and every other -ism humans had come up with.  They were all interconnected, but it wasn’t because religion (or any of the others) was some puppet-master behind the scenes of all the world’s evil.  It was because humans were responsible for them.

At least, that was what he thought his position on religion was.  Looking at his accidentally blasphemous painting, he wondered if he had a lot more subconscious anger against religion than he’d realized.  Or maybe this was just his general cynicism about everything coming out.  He wasn’t sure which possibility was more troubling.

It was a shitty painting, anyway.  It didn’t suggest a message, it slammed you in the face with it.  The technique was there--the composition was iffy, but the use of color was good--but the subject matter was so blatantly symbolic, so aggressively rebellious it wasn’t subversive or interesting in any way.  It was just . . . clumsy.

So there was another evening wasted.  Grantaire shoved the still-wet canvas in a drawer of his desk where he wouldn’t have to look at it and went back to his beer.


	5. The Rebel

_Christmas, 6:18 am_

The day before had been miserable and dark and cold, but when Marius awoke on Christmas morning, the world had been transformed.  Some time during the night, the sleet had turned to snow--real, beautiful snow, not the stinging little ice pellets that had fallen off and on for the past week.  It had fallen thick and fast and soft, and now the world was buried in it, the tree branches sagging down under thick icing-like mounds of it, the grid of sidewalks and squares of lawn sandwiched between the wings of the dorm building covered over with thick, soft, whiteness.  It was still falling, too, in huge, fluffy flakes that grayed the air and reduced the trees and the lights that surrounded the parking lot to vague blurs.

Marius tumbled out of bed, tangling his feet in the blankets in the process, and opened the window, sticking his head and shoulders out into the winter world that he’d been transported to overnight.  The eaves of the building sheltered him from most of the snow, but a few flakes brushed his face and ears.  He felt a huge grin split his face, in spite of the cold air that bit through his pajamas and already had his teeth chattering.   _This_ was right.   _This_ was what a Christmas morning should be. He closed the window and reached for his coat.

He was already tucking his pajama pants into his boots, his ski mittens gripped under one arm, when he thought to question his first instinct.  This was what kids did, running out to play in the first snow.  He was supposed to be an adult now--he had just turned 18, after all, and he was at college, studying for a degree.  And now that he’d separated himself from his grandfather, he was really on his own.  Maybe he was a little too old for this.

But he could at least go out for a walk.  Adults took walks, didn’t they?

The snow dampened the noise of the world as well as the color. Marius could hear none of the sounds that usually filled the air on campus--no traffic, no voices calling or laughing, no doors slamming. There was nothing but the slight crunch of the snow under his boots and the faintest whisper of snowflakes falling. The sound of one snowflake hitting the ground, that was nothing. But hundreds of them together, brushing against tree branches and settling into the snow already on the ground, all built up together into a gentle rustling that filled the whole world.

Marius maintained a dignified pace down the sidewalk, staring at the changed world around him, at the way the snow piled up on the few cars left in the parking lot, at how it plumped up the branches of trees and bushes until they were just shapeless masses of snow.  But the call of the smooth white stretches of untouched snow was too much.  He stopped, looking up and down the sidewalk.  There was no one in sight.  There was hardly anyone on campus at all, he reminded himself, not on Christmas Day.  He tugged the flaps of his hat down more firmly around his ears, a grin pushing at the corners of his mouth.

He retraced his steps for a few paces, stepping backward through his footprints.  Then he took a running start and launched himself past the edge of the sidewalk into the smooth, unblemished snow.  Soft flakes puffed up around him and he looked back to see how far he’d jumped: a few feet of blankness lay between him and the last of his footprints on the path.  He turned back toward the empty space in front of him (somewhere underneath all the snow lay the green lawn where, a few months ago, students had sprawled on blankets to study and play guitar and soak up the sun), and took another running leap, kicking up snow behind him as he flew across the quad.  He found himself laughing and whooping like a little kid, just from the sheer joy of running around in the new, beautiful snow.  

On his next jump, his feet slipped out from underneath him and he fell backward into the drifts; cold flakes went up his sleeves and down the back of his neck and up under the waistband of his coat, and it was absolutely _glorious_.  He flung his arms out and swept them back and forth to make wings, spitting out the snow that cascaded down into his face; he dragged his legs back and forth to make the skirt of the angel.  One of his pant legs had come untucked from his boot and the cold burned on his exposed skin, but he didn’t even care.  He was still smiling, his cheeks ached from it, but he couldn’t stop.

Then he lay quite still, there on his back in the snow, blinking against the flakes that fell onto his eyelashes from the gray sky and just stayed there in stillness.  He opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue and a few flakes settled on it, momentary bits of cold that melted away almost instantly.  He listened again to the quietness of the world, now even more muted by the snow piled up around his head. For a moment, he just stayed there, full of the feeling that everything was beautiful and good, hoping somehow to hold onto that feeling and make it stay forever.

When the fierce cold against his legs started to become dampness as his body heat melted the snow, Marius finally pushed himself to his feet--trying not to ruin the snow angel but, as always, not quite succeeding.  He hopped a little way away from the base of his angel and shook himself, stamping his feet to dislodge the clumps of snow that clung to his pajama pants.  The beautiful thick snow still called to him, but he was shivering in earnest now, his teeth clattering madly in his head, and his stomach was rumbling too.  At the memory of the hot chocolate mix back in his dorm room, his mouth started to water and he turned back toward the sidewalk.  It was time for a strategic retreat for the moment--but he would be back after breakfast, with two layers of pants and a full stomach and maybe an under-bed storage bin that he could use as a sled on one of the hills out back of the dorm.

It wasn’t until he got to the door and reached for the pants pocket that wasn’t there that he realized what he’d done.  He checked his coat pockets frantically, but now that he thought about it he had a very clear memory of his ID card hanging on its lanyard from the post of the bed, of seeing it as he went out without the image registering.  And his coat pockets were definitely empty (at least, empty of anything that wasn’t old ticket stubs and crumpled tissues and gum wrappers; empty of ID card).  He was locked out.

Some of the other buildings had a kind of entryway, an outer set of doors that opened without a card swipe to let you into a kind of airlock that had a phone in it that you could use to call up to a friend’s room or to the Resident Assistant on duty to get let in.  But of course Marius’s building did not have this feature--just the one set of double doors that were firmly locked against anyone without an ID card.  Marius considered walking up to one of the other buildings that did have the airlock--he could call someone to let him in in five minutes from a phone in another building and then walk back here to meet them--but then he remembered that he didn’t know a single person who was staying on campus for the break.  All the phone numbers he knew would just ring in empty rooms.

So he settled for just banging on the doors with his mittened fists, hoping someone would hear and let him in.  There were still people in the building--their cars sat in the parking lot, covered in several inches of snow--unless these were the cars of people who’d flown somewhere for the holiday or carpooled with other people?  He remembered seeing lights in one or two of the windows the night before, and he’d heard the shower on his floor running sometime last night.  So there were surely people here.  But all the same, no one answered his knocking.

He’d given up pounding on the door and was huddled miserably under the eaves of the building, his arms wrapped around himself, wondering what he he should do--what if he were locked out for _hours_?  That could be seriously dangerous.  Maybe he should go up to one of the academic buildings, just to keep warm.  But then how would he ever get back into his own building?--when the door opened and someone came hurrying out into the falling snow.  With a strangled yelp, Marius leapt at the door just in time to rattle the handle uselessly as the lock clicked.

The person who’d just left the building--it was an older student Marius recognized but didn’t actually know, a tall guy with bright blonde hair who walked everywhere quickly, striding through crowds of more aimless students as if on an important mission--turned to stare at him, a quizzical frown on his face. Marius saw himself as this older student must: a red-faced kid in pajamas and snow boots, his clothing caked with snow and his nose dripping.  “What . . . are you locked out?” the student asked.

Marius nodded, feeling his cheeks flush even more under the red from the cold air.  “Please tell me you have your ID card?”

The guy reached into his pocket for his wallet, then pulled out his ID card and passed it through the key swipe.  The door clicked and Marius quickly pulled it open.

“Thank you so much,” he said as the warm air of the lobby washed over him.  “You saved my butt.”

“No problem,” the older student said, putting away his ID card.  He turned and headed off toward the parking lot as Marius hurried inside and stomped the snow off himself in the dorm lobby.

His cheeks still burned with embarrassment over the stupidity of what he’d done.  But they were also numb from the cold, and his fingers were stiff inside his mittens, and his pajama pants absolutely soaked--and it all felt _exactly_ right.  As soon as he got upstairs and into a dry pair of jean and a hoodie and made a cup of hot chocolate, this morning would be exactly what a Christmas morning should be.

It was just missing the gravely voice of an old man exclaiming over a little boy’s presents and recounting the way they used to string popcorn and cranberries for the tree in The Old Days.

And with that thought, the perfection of the morning turned sour.  Marius went back to his room, changed into dry clothes, fixed himself a cup of hot chocolate, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Christmases past, and neither snow nor hot chocolate seemed very important anymore.  He found himself sitting on the windowsill, staring at the word “home” on the screen of his cell phone, his thumb hovering over the green button.

Home.  Could he really call it that?  His grandfather’s house had been home once--as upset as he was over the whole thing, he couldn’t deny that, as a little boy, he’d felt like he belonged there.  But as the years went on, his grandfather grew less fond and more demanding, and Marius grew less willing to blindly accept everything he said.  As a little boy, he’d listened to his grandfather ramble on about “the blacks” and “the communists” and believed he was just stating Truths about the world, but as he grew older, he started to recognize them as opinions--and then as pretty awful opinions.  He started to question, they started to argue, his grandfather started to restrict him, and somewhere along the way their closeness had turned to suffocation.

He wasn’t really sure how it had happened, the final break.  It happened the night before he left for college.  He’d been sick to death of his grandfather and his oppressive rules and the jaundiced worldview he tried to force on him, and eager to get out of that house the next day, but he hadn’t been intending to leave home for good.  And he didn’t think his grandfather had been planning to kick him out--if he had, it would have happened sooner and with much less ambiguity.  They’d just started fighting--again--over something stupid, one of the classes Marius was hoping to take the following semester (all speculation--as it turned out, the class wasn’t even being offered that spring, and he’d later learned it wouldn’t have a prayer of getting into it as a freshman anyway--they’d argued over nothing but speculation).  Somehow the fight had gotten bigger, more dramatic, taking on a life of its own.  It was like neither of them knew how to stop.  He’d shouted, and his grandfather had shouted, and they both said terrible things, and then Marius was yelling that his grandfather should say goodbye now because after he left the next day he was never coming back and his grandfather shouted back good, because that was what he wanted.

They stood there in horror for a minute, staring at one another as what they’d just said sank in.  Neither of them said anything--after that, what else _could_ they say?--and after a minute Marius turned and went up to his room.  He was still trembling with anger, but he was also scared at the way his future had suddenly been ripped open into a yawning chasm, and part of him wanted to take back what he’d said.  But he didn’t see any way to do it--and another part of him still felt that he would be better off apart from his grandfather.  So he’d just cried alone in his room that night (silent, angry tears that he muffled with his pillow so his grandfather wouldn’t know how hurt he felt), took an awkward goodbye of the old man the next morning, and resolutely shut the door on his childhood.

Thinking back over it now, on Christmas Day, hunched over his solitary cup of hot chocolate, Marius was filled with sadness for everything he’d lost.  His grandfather was a bigoted, vitriolic old man--he was still all too aware of it--but that just made the sting worse.  Because it wasn’t a matter of just apologizing and being welcomed back into the warm house with open arms.  The open arms might be there, if he asked, but the old man offering them would be the same terrible person he’d always been.

He pressed the red button, and put the phone away.


	6. The Malcontent

_Christmas, 6:35 am_

Enjolras’s alarm went off at 6:35, a strident beep that was _just_ enough to get him stumbling across the room to shut it off (sometimes he understood why roommates had such a hard time getting along with him).  Sheer habit, painfully developed, kept him shuffling out into the brightly-lit hallway instead of back toward his bed, but it wasn’t until he’d gone to the bathroom and washed his face and was halfway through brushing his teeth that anything he was really conscious of anything he was doing.  He blinked blearily at his reflection, pale under the harsh fluorescent lights, at the dark circles under his eyes.  He hadn’t even stayed up late the night before; at this point he felt like the look of tiredness was just permanently etched into his face.

He was still only half awake when he got back to his room, and it wasn’t until he tripped over the ridiculous gift basket he’d left on the floor by his dresser that he remembered it was Christmas.  Of course, some part of his brain had been aware of it all along--it was the whole reason he was awake at 6:45 during a school vacation--but the thought hadn’t actually registered.  Not that it made a lot of difference, but still.  He’d been raised in mainstream American culture and, even though he rejected both the religious basis of the holiday and its wasteful and obnoxious commercialization, there was a part of him that felt--irrationally--a little wave of warmth at the thought.   _It’s Christmas._

A glance at his alarm clock told him he was already running late.  He shoved the basket out of the way of his dresser drawer, the loose sheets of cellophane clinging to the legs of his sweatpants when he tried to kick them away.

The basket had arrived the afternoon before--perfect timing for a Christmas gift--and contained an assortment of fresh fruit, a jar of blueberry-pomegranate preserves and another of orange-ginger marmalade, and an array of gourmet hot chocolate packets.  It was from his parents, of course, a perfectly thoughtful, perfectly appropriate Christmas gift for their son who, although he was spending Christmas away from home and although he didn’t have any typical interests for a young person his age, they still loved in a perfectly natural, perfectly distant way.  

It was all very unobjectionable--and that was what drove him crazy.

There was no _reason_ to feel so frustrated with his family and the perfect way they lived their perfect lives, but he couldn’t help the irrational feeling.  It wasn’t the wastefulness of their lifestyle, or the way it perpetuated class privilege, or the just plain wrongness of living that way when people around the world were starving to death--all that disgusted him on an intellectual level, and he made as much quite clear whenever he had the opportunity.  But what rankled him in a way that he couldn’t justify--and therefore couldn’t blow off in fiery tirades--was how _nice_ they were, how perfectly happy and appropriate and bland.

Between his pre-waking-up daze and his frustration over a fruit basket, Enjolras was running late when he left the dorm, a banana from the basket clutched in one hand (the only thing more illogical than being angry about a thoughtful gift would be to not use said thoughtful gift out of spite) and a brush for the snow in the other.  A yelp from behind him stopped him in his hasty tracks.  He turned to see a younger student, red-cheeked, snow sticking to his hat and pants, pulling uselessly on the now-locked door.

“What . . . are you locked out?” he asked, realization dawning.  How long had this poor kid been out here?

“Please tell me you have your ID card?”  

Enjolras let the shivering kid into the building and he stammered his gratitude.

“No problem.”  He went on his way, his mood slightly improved--although the chore of brushing the half foot of snow off his car dampened it somewhat.

The car was his parents’ idea as well, of course.  If it had been up to Enjolras, he wouldn’t have owned a car, relying instead on public transportation (even though in the outskirts of a medium-sized city like this, this really wasn’t a workable possibility) or walking or biking everywhere.  Cars contributed to pollution and global warming, everyone knew that; but even more so, American culture was quickly turning them from a luxury to a necessity, and even though the price of cars was still at the luxury level for many people in the country, employers and shopping options and everything else important for getting by in life was more in line with cultural expectations than the practical workability--and anyway, there were a lot of reasons not to drive a car if you could help it.  But Enjolras’s family had given him a car, and it seemed wrong to own a car but let it rust to pieces even when you did need it, so he’d brought it to school with him, using it only when it was unavoidable.  

Despite the moral issues he had with car ownership, however, he had to admit that there were times when it was really helpful to have a car.  There weren’t any buses running on Christmas morning, of course, and the neighborhood where he was going was way too far to walk, even if it weren’t below freezing outside.

The roads weren’t great, with the snow still coming down heavily and the plows not really making much of an effort to keep up with it, not on Christmas morning, and it was a little after 7:30 when Enjolras arrived at the shelter.

“You’re late,” Johanna told him as she let him in the kitchen door.

“Sorry.  The roads are bad.”

“Aw, you know I’m just teasing you.”  She punched him in the shoulder, and Enjolras returned her grin.

The kitchen was chilly, despite the blue flames licking up from the stove.  Enjolras took his gloves off reluctantly but left his coat on.  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Potatoes,” she said immediately.  “The peeler’s in the drawer under the knife block.  Peel them first, then rinse them, then chop them up.  We got to get them on right away or they’ll never get cooked in time.  Ordinarily I’d use frozen hash browns, but somebody gave us a whole mess of potatoes and we got to use them.”

Enjolras pushed up his sleeves and got to work.  It was quiet in the kitchen without being silent--there was the hiss of sausages inside their covered pan on the stove, the gurgle of the coffee maker, Johanna’s soft talking (half to herself) as she moved about, getting things ready--and Enjolras liked the atmosphere.  He liked the uncomplicated, systematic task.  He liked that the paint on the walls was marked up in places and that the handle of the peeler was loose and that the pipes in the big industrial sink squealed when you turned the hot water on early in the morning.

Enjolras finished with the potatoes and Johanna put him on juice duty--measuring out three cans of water for every can of frozen orange juice concentrate and mixing it up, trying to squish the lumps again the side of the pitcher with the back of a wooden spoon. Katie, the other staff member on duty, came down to flip pancakes for a while before she had to back upstairs to check that the residents had cleaned up their rooms and the shared spaces, as the shelter rules specified.  Other than that, it was just Enjolras and Johanna--which was the very reason why he was here.  The holiday season in general was a pretty good time for volunteers--companies and churches sent in groups throughout December, and many individuals made a point of coming in to help out some time during the month as well--but Christmas day itself was the exception.  Since the need was there, and since Enjolras honestly didn’t have anything else to be doing that day, it was only logical for him to come help out.  And it satisfied that American kid in him who, despite all his adult self’s objections to the holiday and the way it was celebrated, felt like he should do something special for Christmas.

The dining room was humming with energy when Enjolras carried out the first big pan of pancakes.  Even the mothers looked more wide-awake than usual--but ninety percent of the activity was the kids.  Usually most of them stumbled down to breakfast bleary-eyed and half asleep, but today they looked like they’d been drinking coffee since 5.  Little knots of children ran in and out of the dining room, yelling and clambering over chairs.

A few of them ran up to Enjolras, clamoring for his attention.  “Julian, Julian,” Trey crowed (Enjolras used his first name here--it had taken some getting used to after seven years of going by “Enjolras,” but it had seemed like not inviting the residents to call him by his first name sent a wrong message).  “I’m getting a H.E.R.O. City!”

“A what now?”

“A H.E.R.O. City--the guys I was telling you about, the robots?”

“No you ain’t!” one of his friends butted in.

“Yeah-huh!” Trey insisted.  “Manuel was poking at the presents, and his finger went through the paper an’ we could see inside and they was red pipes like on the H.E.R.O. City boxes.”

“Nah, I talked to your mama,” Naomi said.  “She told me you been _re-e-e-e-ally_ bad this year and Santa’s bringin’ you a box full of spiders!”  She giggled and pushed in front of Trey.  “Guess what I’m gettin’!”

“Um . . .” Enjolras pretended to think.  “A Tyrannosaurus Rex.”

“No!”  The scorn in the five-year-old’s voice was staggering.  “You don’t get Tyrannonosaurus Rexes for _Christmas_!  I’m gettin’ Spiderman shoes.  My old shoes are too small now, and the light-ups don’t work anymore, and I asked Mama and she said maybe my next pair can be Spiderman ones.  So I--”

“Kids!  Come and line up now for breakfast!” Katie called, and Naomi waved and tore off behind Trey and the other kids, wailing like a fire engine.

As he went back into the kitchen, Enjolras felt a grin breaking across his face.  The shelter was a loud, messy place, the air thick with the tension of too many people crowded together, all with their own worries and needs and habits butting up against each other.  The hot chocolate was watery and the potatoes unevenly cooked (that one was all on Enjolras and his poor knife skills that yielded pieces of very different sizes) and the presents under the Christmas tree were mostly things like hats and backpacks and socks--and Spiderman sneakers.  It was nothing like the Christmas morning he would have spent with his family, eating over-easy cage-free eggs and fresh squeezed orange juice in the spotless dining room and then exchanging perfectly appropriate gifts in front of a fire, with a jazzy Christmas piano CD playing in the background.

But here, things felt real.  There were real problems and real successes and failures, and the numbness that Enjolras always felt, sitting in his parents’ living room, was gone.


	7. The Orphan

_Christmas, 9:28 am_

The big skating rink in the mall was closed, of course, but the little one--the sketchy one with rust stains in the ice and no doors on the bathroom stalls--had had a poster about special Christmas morning hours, so Courfeyrac braved the slippery roads to check it out. He found a disappointingly empty parking lot and a sour-faced old man behind the counter.

“Four dollars, seven if you’re renting skates,” the man grunted as Courfeyrac approached his window.

“I brought my own,” Courfeyrac told him, holding up the pair of battered brown skates. He counted out four dollars and the man handed him a strip of waxy red paper to fasten around his wrist. “Thanks! And merry Christmas!”

“We close at eleven.”

That was the first person he’d wished a merry Christmas, Courfeyrac realized as he sat down to tie his skates.

The ice wasn’t quite as smooth as it should have been, considering he was the only person to get on it that day. But it wasn’t too bad, and the large rusty stain that had bloomed over the back left corner of the rink the last time he’d been there was gone (Courfeyrac didn’t know whether to be reassured or alarmed by this development). He took a slow turn around the rink to start off, then pushed as fast as he could go for his second time around, skidding and kicking up crystals of ice as he took the far turn a little too quickly. Cheesy Christmas music was playing somewhere up in the rafters of the place, the tunes almost unrecognizeable through the scratchy old speakers.

His craving for speed satisfied after a few fast laps, Courfeyrac arced out into the middle of the rink and played with skating backward, turning smoothly as he went along to transition between facing backward and forward without affecting his momentum, taking pride in the way his feet still remembered how to do the thing even though it’d been several years since he’d been able to skate on a regular basis. He tried a simple jump, but he wobbled badly on the landing and had to windmill his arms wildly to save himself from falling. It didn’t all stay with you, apparently (although to be fair, he’d never been very good at jumps, not even in that winter of ninth grade, when he used to go down to the canal every weekend).

Despite everything that had been wrong that winter, skating always brought him a feeling of peace, of assurance that whatever else happened, he was still the same person. The steady rhythm of the skates beneath him, pushing at the ice, the smooth gliding motion, the coldness of the air against the heat the exercise generated under his jacket. That was why he’d spent so much time down on the canal, weaving in and out among the crowds of weekend skaters--the families with kids wobbly on skates tied too loose, the couples skating hand in hand, the old men who skated placidly with their hands clasped behind their backs--or speeding by himself through the falling snow on weekday afternoons after school was out. With his mom in and out of the hospital, relatives in and out of town as people tried to figure out whether they needed to say goodbye to her now or not, with the house empty and dark half the time and too loud and full of people the other half, the canal became his place of safety and centering. And though he still associated the feel of ice beneath his feet with that winter, it was those moments of stillness that it called back to him, and not the rest of the it.

At least, that was what usually happened. But today, in the big echo-y emptiness of the skating rink, he just felt alone. He stuck it out for a good forty minutes, hoping that some people might come in later on in the morning, that maybe the families were just busy with stockings and presents or the young couples just relishing the chance to sleep in. Ten o’clock came, and then ten-thirty, and the ice was bumpy under his skates and his ankles were out of shape and sore. He took one last turn around the rink and then clomped out over the rubbery floor to where he’d left his boots.

His phone buzzed in his pocket on his way out, as he waved goodbye to the old man behind his newspaper. He picked it up, wedging it between his ear and his shoulder as he fumbled to unlock his car while holding back the skates to protect the paint job.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hello, son. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas to you. How’s Florida?”

His father groaned. “Muggy. It’s not hot, not terrible at least, but it’s so humid that you’re sweating all the time. I don’t know why people come here for the winter; it’s really not pleasant at all. How’s the weather there?”

“It’s perfect--Dad, we have snow!”

"Really?"

“Yeah, it started last night. We have like six, maybe eight inches right now--and it’s still falling!”

“Well, be careful. Was that your car door?”

“Yeah, I’m just heading back to campus now. I was out skating.”

“Sounds like fun. You’re not going to drive on the phone, are you?”

“No, Dad, I’ll wait until we’re done talking.”

There was a pause. Courfeyrac leaned over the place the skates on the floor in front of the passenger seat, then leaned back against the driver’s-side door, the windowpane a cold shock against the back of his neck.

“I sent a box,” his father said. “I don’t know if you got it yet . . .”

“Not yet.” He heard his father mutter a frustrated curse. “But I’m sure it’ll get here soon. Hey, and then that’s two Christmases for me!”

“I’m sorry, I know this isn’t a very good Christmas.” His father said this every year. “You shouldn’t have to spend Christmas away from home, alone at school. I’m just not very--”

“It’s fine, Dad.” Courfeyrac cut him off, as he did every year. “I’m fine.”

Maybe he shouldn’t cut him off, give him an easy out. Maybe he should wait in silence and make his father actually speak aloud the reasons why he’d been away from home the past three Christmases. Not the surface reasons (they both knew that business trips at odd times went with the territory of doing business with people who didn’t celebrate Western holidays, and they both also knew that you could almost always avoid these poorly-timed trips if you _really_ wanted to), but the deeper reasons, the reasons why his father accepted the assignments to go meet with Japanese businessmen in Florida and Tokyo and Seattle every year around Christmas.

But what would be the point of forcing him to speak the reasons aloud? Courfeyrac knew what his father would say, or roughly so at least: _I’m not very good at family things; I never was._ (Not true. He was different from how Mom had been, but not bad.) _Christmas is really difficult for me ever since your mother died._ (That, Courfeyrac understood; the holiday would likely always be a confusing one for him, images of candy canes forever entangled with IV drips and the cord to the morphine button.)

_Being a family has been really difficult for me since your mother died._

Making him say it wouldn’t make it any less true. It would just make him sad. And Courfeyrac loved his dad--and knew that, for all his faults, his dad still loved him too--so he always cut him off before he had to give voice to the uncomfortable, unchangeable truths about their relationship.

“It’s fine, really,” he said again, as he’d said so many times. “It’s nice and quiet on campus; really relaxing. I have the hall all to myself, so I can play my music as loud as I want. I’m making cookies this afternoon and it’s going to be fantastic--the rest of the month you practically have to wait by the oven like a vulture if you ever want to bake anything.”

His dad chuckled, and the moment was over. They talked for a while longer, his dad telling him about a funny miscommunication in the meeting the day before, Courfeyrac telling him about the movie he’d watched the night before. The old man came out of the rink office and locked up before driving away in a rusty old truck, and Courfeyrac’s breath fogged up the windshield of his car.

“Ben and Casey want us to spend New Years’ with them,” his father was saying. “I said yes; I hope that’s okay.”

“That’s fine. When are you getting back, again?”

“Friday. You’re flying in the next day, right?”

“Yeah. It’ll be good to see you, Dad.”

“You too.” For a moment, Courfeyrac thought his father was going to say something else, maybe one of the things Courfeyrac had stopped him from saying before. But all he said was, “Well, I’ll let you go, I suppose. It was good talking to you.”

“You too, Dad. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, son. I love you.” He said it very quietly, like he always did. But Courfeyrac was always listening for it.

“I love you too, Dad.”

The phone beeped in his ear to signal the end of the call. He tucked it back in his pocket. He turned on the car, cranking up the defroster to its highest level, and swabbed at the mist that covered the windshield. The car felt chilly now, though he hadn’t noticed it when he’d been talking to his father. And now Courfeyrac had the feeling he recognized from all the Christmases of his childhood, that feeling when he realized that he’d just opened the last of his presents, and that was it.

 


	8. The Foreigner

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> after a year-long hiatus, I am back with this fic! I can't guarantee I'll hit the end this time round either, but at least I'll have internet access at Christmas this year so maybe?!? I can at least promise a chapter of angst for each of the remaining Amis . . . and then hopefully I'll even get to a bit of the fluff.

_Christmas, 10:04 am_

The morning could not have been more perfectly wintery. Huge flakes of snow clouded the air, falling slowly, but so densely that they’d already built up into a thick layer on the ground. The trees were covered with snow as well, their branches built up into whimsical fairy-tale castles of white. The view from Combeferre’s dorm room window looked like the most classic scene of New England winter imaginable.

He’d been doing everything he could to avoid going out in it.

The other students, for some reason Combeferre could not fathom, _loved_ this weather. Every year, as the calendar counted down into October, and then November, the enthusiasm for the weather swelled along with the building cold--broken only by random days of cold drizzle--and with the first snow of the winter everyone was going crazy, running outside to roll around in the stuff and throw it at each other, giggling like children. Combeferre, meanwhile, put on an extra jumper and huddled in his room, eating extra-spicy curry and thinking wistfully of summer days in Kerala.

Today, however, Combeferre’s desperate need for a book trumped even his hatred of winter weather. He was working on his proposal for his senior honors thesis--the proposals weren’t due until the first week of March, but when you took twenty-one credits a semester (three over the normal upper limit for full-time students, by special dispensation from the Dean of Sciences) it was hard to devote any time or thought to anything besides staying on top of things, so it was better to get it done now, while he could devote his full attention to it.

And, if he was being quite honest, he had nothing better to do, stuck on campus by himself for the two weeks of winter break. Combeferre knew a few of the other international students, but he wasn’t terribly close with any of them. And most of the ones in his year seemed to have found an excuse to get off campus--going to Boston or Washington D.C. together, or going home with an American friend to have a traditional holiday.

He’d always felt disconnected here, Combeferre admitted to himself as he suited up for his foray into the cold, pulling on trousers over his flannel pajamas and wrapping a muffler around his neck, but this year it was worse, for some reason. Nothing major had changed from his previous years at the school, but he was starting to be too aware of his lack of friendships, of the way he _still_ felt like such an absolute foreigner, even after two and a half years in the country.

The library was one of the few places where he consistently felt like he belonged. It was quiet there, people working on their own on their own projects, your fitness to be there determined by your academic ability and not your knowledge of current music or the rules of American football. He had been planning to just step in, find his book, and get back to his warm room (why anyone felt 70 degrees was an appropriate indoor temperature, he would never understand), but as he methodically layered up, he decided it would do him good to spend some time in a place where he was on solid footing. He slipped his laptop and a few of the other books he was working with into his backpack and set off.

The anticipation of the warm, welcoming atmosphere of the library _almost_ made the trek across campus bearable, at least at first. His muffler blocked most of the cold air from snaking in around his neck, and the footing was good enough that he could walk quickly, which helped as well. He was surprised to see the snow-covered lawns completely deserted. Of course, it was break, so not many students were around, but with weather like this there should have been _someone._ There wasn’t much that would bring the remaining students out of their dorm rooms where they huddled over their canned soup and their Netflix queues--but beautiful snowy weather like this was one thing that _would_.

And yes, it was beautiful. He could see that, or at least he understood that to the eyes of somebody who liked this kind of thing, this was an exceptional example of a snowy day. The snow mounded over the bushes and benches and stone walls looked perfectly fluffy, and you knew jumping onto it would be like leaping onto a pile of feather duvets (ah, the feather comforter--one of the few things that made this climate worth it). The drifting snowflakes hushed everything, muting the sounds of traffic and fading distant buildings and trees into pastel shadows. It was peaceful, in its own way, the quiet, steady fall of the snow.

But it was still brutally, inhumanly cold, and in Combeferre’s mind the beauty in no way made up for that.

He was hunched over, his shoulders up and his head down against the cold, as he walked up the library steps, and it was only when he pulled on the door handle and found it locked that he realized that the whole place was closed up and dark. That was strange--it was already past 10 (he pulled his phone out to make sure), and winter break hours were 9 to 4. He checked the sign on the door, just in case he was remembering wrong.

And there it was: _Christmas Day: CLOSED._

Of course. It was Christmas today; he’d forgotten.

The Christmas decorations hanging from the lampposts seemed to mock Combeferre as he made his way, shivering, back to his dorm. Was he really so out of touch with this culture? This was a country he admired--not unreservedly, of course, for he was well aware there were many things wrong with the United States, just as there were with India (although there was a clear winner between the two where the _weather_ was concerned)--and where he planned to spend the next several years of his life. Or at least, that had been his plan when he’d decided to study medicine in the U.S. But maybe he couldn’t do it after all. He should just call it all off; let Mother and Father know when he Skyped with them next that he would be coming home for good this summer.

Of course, that was being overdramatic. Millions of immigrants all over the world lived in countries where they didn’t quite fit in, and they survived--and many of them thrived in their new environments. Combeferre, too, would get through this challenge; there was no reason to think that what so many others managed would be impossible for him.

Only--he didn’t know if he would ever really be _happy,_ the whole while he was managing and getting through the challenge. He's survive, but was surviving enough?

The snow was falling thicker now, whispering against the exposed skin around Combeferre's eyes. The ground was getting slippery, and his backpack seemed to have doubled in weight; all he wanted was to be back in his room--and the knowledge that he might be facing years of just wanting to retreat like this weighted heavy on him. The weather, the forgotten holiday, the emptiness of the campus over break, it all just reminded him, over and over again, of all the ways he didn’t belong.

He was a stranger here, and maybe he always would be.

 


	9. The Adventurer

_Christmas, 1:51 pm_

The phone call was even more difficult than he’d thought it would be. He’d known it would be tough--talking to his family on Christmas Day and unable to see them or spend the day with them. He didn’t think he’d find himself on the edge of tears the minute he heard his mother’s voice.

“Feliz Navidad, mi amor!”

Joly muttered a response and tried to cover up the crack in his voice with a moderately convincing cough. He pressed his fingers against his eyes and managed to pull himself together.

“Merry Christmas, Mamí.”

"How are you? Are you staying warm?"

Joly grinned in spite of himself. "Very warm, Mami. It's freezing here, but I wear two pairs of socks all the time and sometimes two sweaters, and I haven't lost anything to frostbite yet."

"Little rascal," she said fondly. There was a fumbling noise, a beep, and then the fuzziness of the line told Joly he'd been put on speakerphone.

"Hi?" he said hesitantly. A chorus of greetings rained down on him--he could hear his father's deep baritone in there, and his brother and sister's trebles and his abuela's rough nasal voice--and his eyes welled up with tears again; as his dorm room went all blurry, he had a moment of panic where he thought he couldn't do it, imagined saying _no, sorry, I can't, I love you but I have to hang up._ But he scrubbed at his eyes with the cuff of his sweater and took deep breaths and managed not to whimper audibly.

So, a success so far.

"Joly, Joly, Joly, did you get our present?" Paolo asked.

"Yes," Joly managed. Two more quick breaths. "Yeah, it got here two days ago. That was a _great_ card, thank you!" The drawing on the front depicted what Joly could only assume was a deer from the area around Chernoble; inside, wobbly block letters read: _HAPPY CHRiSMAS YOLi DO YUU HAVE SNOW i MADE THE SANTA COOKi EAT iT LAST GOODBYE_.

"I wrote it myself."

Joly pretended shock. "No! You did all that writing yourself? You are getting _so_ grown up." _I'm missing seeing you grow up._

"Did the pastries go through all right?" his mother asked. "We tried to wrap them up very carefully, but you know how they are in the mail; they throw everything around."

"They were fine, Mami." The cookies had arrived in pieces; Paolo's Santa had been dismembered and was distributed evenly throughout the ziplock bag, its constituents only recognizable by the incredible amount of hot cinnamon candies he'd squeezed onto every inch of it. The journey had been kinder to the _pan dulce_ , which was thoroughly dried out, but still in one piece, and still tasting just like Joly's childhood. He'd cried himself silly over it two mornings ago--but that wasn't something that needed to be shared. "They were so good; I ate most of them already. Thank you."

"We wanted to send a little bit of home to you, since we can't bring you back for the holidays," she said. "I wish we could, it makes me so sad to think of you there all alone, and--"

"I know, Mami, it's fine," Joly quickly cut her off. "It's not so bad here; there are other people on campus, too." He knew there were, just like he knew that God existed. He'd had about the same amount of contact with both parties. "And the weather's really pretty."

"Do you have snow?" Carlota clamored. "We looked on the weather, it said eight to twelve inches there, was it true?"

"It's true," Joly told her. "There's about nine inches right now, and it's still coming down fast. It's just like in the pictures, a white Christmas."

"A white Christmas," his abuela echoed. "¡Que lindo! You send us pictures, you hear?"

"I _tried_ ," Joly moaned. "But my phone camera is so bad; it's all blurry and it doesn't come close to how pretty it looks. Look in the book we have with the pictures of Russia, it's just like that."

"Did you make a snowman?" Carlota asked. "Did you make a snow angel?"

"Did you make a snow dinosaur?" Paolo chimed in, not to be outdone. "Did you make a snow lion? Did you make a snow--um--um--dog?"

"I didn't make a snow _anything_ ," Joly told them. "Right now it's too cold, the snow isn't sticky."

"Snow is sticky?" Carlota asked, and Joly could see in his mind's eye her nose wrinkling in disbelief, her eyebrows shooting up suspiciously, and _god_ he had to stop doing that, letting himself imagine them, because he could see her _just perfectly_ and she was fifteen hundred miles away.

"Well, it sticks to itself. When it gets wet," he explained. "It has to melt just a little bit, and then it will stick together."

"Weird," she pronounced firmly.

"I'll make a snowman tomorrow," he promised. "A huge, fat one, and I'll name it Paolo." His brother giggled something incomprehensible, and Joly could _see_ in his mind's eye the way his whole chubby face scrunched up when he laughed, and that was _bad_ because now tears were threatening at the corners of his eyes again. "So. Tell me what you got for Christmas," he said quickly, before his voice could break--and Carlota and Paolo were off on a very long description of their presents (a toy, a book, and some clothes for each of them), and Joly had a reprieve from talking.

Eventually, the little ones petered out, and they retreated into the background to play with Paolo's new matchbox cars. "Mi'jo, how _are_ you?" Joly's father asked in the relative calm that followed. "School finished well?"

"Yes, Papi, the grades went up on Monday; I got Bs in everything--a B-plus in biology."

"Good for you; I knew you could do it. Was it hard work?"

"Yeah. Yeah, it was really hard. But I made it, and the first time is the hardest, right?"

"With everything, the first time is the hardest," his father confirmed. Of course, he had no idea about college--none of them did, nobody in Joly's family had ever done this before. And from things he'd overheard other students saying, Joly had a nasty feeling freshman year was supposed to be the _easiest_ part of college. But there was no point in predicting the worst, especially with the loans all signed for anyway; the only way out was straight ahead. "You'll be fine, mi'jito, I'm sure. You were always the smartest kid in your class."

"I won't let you down, Papi."

"You don't worry about us; it's _you_ you have to succeed for," his father said firmly. "We're proud of you already--we were proud of you from the day you came out howling and wiggling, and we always will be."

"Papi," Joly protested, a sob choking his throat.

"You are already all we could ask for in a son," his mother added. "We love you so much, Joly."

"We're very proud of you," his father said again. "And we know you'll be fine. We wish we could do more for you--bring you home for Christmas, help out with room and board . . . but we know you'll do fine." Even through the scratchy speakerphone Joly could hear the effort behind his cheerfulness--not false, but thin, very thin over the ache of longing underneath.

And Joly wanted to scream, to cut through the pretense and bring out into the open the feelings they were all dancing around with eyes squeezed shut. Because it was ridiculous, the way they were all pretending _so hard_ that they weren't all torn up inside, all for the sake of not upsetting the others, when they _knew_ they all felt the same way. And there was a part of him that just wanted to break down, to sob _Mami, Papi, I miss you so much!_

But at the same time, that was the last thing he wanted to do. Because the sadness was just too strong and too painful--and it was a good kind of pain, but dangerous at the same time. And he thought if he actually stopped and acknowledged it, if they all cried together, he might never stop crying.

So he choked back the tears and he forced the image of his family perched on the living-room couches, all bent over the little cordless phone, out of his mind. And he made jokes and carried on the conversation and tried to pretend it was all okay.

Because, in a way it was. It hurt _so much_ to have a family a thousand miles away. But at the same time, the amount of love coming to him from the tinny little phone speaker was just staggering.

"I love you, too," he managed. "And I'm doing fine; really, I am. The first semester went by so fast, summer will be here before you know it."

(After they finally hung up, he lay curled up on his bunk and gave in to the tears, clutching the phone to his chest, for a long, long time.)

 


	10. The Adult

_Christmas, 3:45 pm_

The TV down in the lounge was small and had patches of pink and green bleeding in from the corners of the screen--but it was better than nothing. Feuilly had a DVD of _White Christmas_ out from the university media library, and his tiny little laptop always overheated when he tried to play DVDs on it, so the lounge was his best bet. He collected his sleeping bag and the DVD and a half-eaten bag of pretzels and made his way down the hall, past the closed, locked doors of all the kids who were home with their families for the holiday.

He'd worried that it would be difficult to get permission to stay on campus over the winter break. But the university had ended its dorms-close-over break policy the previous year, in a bid to attract more international students (and their international full tuition payments), and the people at the res life office hadn't batted an eye when Feuilly had told them he wanted to stay in the dorms over Christmas.

It was a good thing they had, because Feuilly wasn't sure where he would've gone otherwise. He'd had a bunch of Thanksgiving invitations, but Christmas break seemed to be a more personal kind of thing, because nobody had offered. And Feuilly didn't have anywhere of his own to go. His last foster home had stopped being his legal residence as of thirty-seven days ago, when he turned eighteen (though he'd already moved out for good, back at the end of the summer). Feuilly wasn't quite sure, but he thought he might technically be homeless. It was a little weird.

But there was also something freeing about it. It was his _last_ foster home. He was out of the system now, no longer a foster kid, no longer a ward of the state. He was an adult, in legal status no different from any of the other kids at college. He could start his new adult life, on his own terms.

And, okay, stale pretzels and a drafty dorm lounge weren't an impressive Adult Life, but you had to start somewhere.

Naturally, when Feuilly got to the lounge, he found that someone had stolen--or lost or broken, and really it didn't matter which, at this point--the cable that hooked the DVD player up to the TV. And this was the only lounge with a working DVD player; the second and third floors only had VCRs, the one in the basement lounge always crashed after ten minutes, and Res Life had stopped replacing the first floor player after it was stolen for the second time in two weeks.

Feuilly sighed and gathered up his stuff from the couch where he'd dumped it. He _could_ try his luck in another dorm, but there was no guarantee they'd be in any better shape than his--and it seemed like a lot of work to go to for an old cheesy movie. He'd been looking forward to the tinny soundtrack and the superficial drama, all problems that could be fixed by five minutes of decent communication, but it wasn't like _White Christmas_ was an essential part of Christmas for him.

Really, there wasn't _anything_ that was an essential part of Christmas for Feuilly. The nature of the holiday had changed so much throughout his life that he didn't have anything in particular to insist on, no single taste or sound or activity that said _Christmas_ to him in a way nothing else did.

When he was four, Christmas was bright colored lights and gingerbread cookies and a little wind-up mouse plushie that played a tinkling, off-key "Away in a Manger." When he was six, Christmas was the power out, his mother's boyfriend drunk, and the same little wind-up mouse sitting on his pillow next to his ear, a little dingier but still plinking away. When he was seven, Christmas was candy canes and a roaring fire in the living room of a stranger's house that they kept insisting was his home now.

And so it went, on through the years: Feuilly's strongest memories of Christmas at nine were new snow boots and sledding with Andrés and a stomach ache from too many sugar cookies. At ten, Andrés had gone back home to his own parents, and Gavin had taken his place, and there was no snow. At eleven, Feuilly was in a different foster home, one where Christmas was just TV dinners and a pumpkin pie from the grocery store and the littlest girl watching Disney on Ice four times a row. At thirteen, he was in his first group home, sharing a Christmas dinner of cheap ham and mashed potatoes out of a box with twelve other "troubled" kids.

Christmas last year had been a quiet day at home, his foster siblings up in their rooms playing video games or listening to music, his foster parents falling asleep on the couch; Feuilly had ended up spending the afternoon reading a library book, and it had been a quiet and relaxing day, but nothing terribly special.

So it didn't really matter that everything was different, this Christmas. Why should it? He'd never had two Christmases the same, in all the years he remembered.

In a way, he regretted the lack of Christmas traditions; no one on his hall had been able to talk about anything else (well, that, and the end-of-semester workload) ever since Thanksgiving. And while Feuilly wasn't particularly bothered that Christmas wasn't a big thing for him--you can't miss what you've never had, right?--he did see how _happy_ it made the other students, how Christmas, for them, was something warm and cozy and hopeful, and just to know that it was coming up soon made even the stressful weeks at the end of the semester a little easier. It would've been nice to have something like that.

But maybe he could. After all, he _was_ an adult now, and the only one in charge of his life was Feuilly himself. If he wanted to start a Christmas tradition, he could. And he could make it happen again next year, and the next, and the next.

"I'll do it," he said out loud to the empty hallway. "I'll . . . I'll . . . um."

What did one do for Christmas? Food was the main thing he was aware of, but he didn't have a lot of flexibility there. Back in his room, Feuilly surveyed the shelf of his bookcase devoted to food: canned soup, canned beans, instant mashed potatoes, a quarter-bag of stale candy corn left over from Halloween. Nothing particularly festive--and with no car and no money, and all the stores closed for the holiday anyway, he couldn't do much about that.

Music was equally a bust. Short of going down to the chilly computer lab to get on pandora or YouTube, he had no way of playing Christmas music, and he didn't have the voice to make his own music (not to mention that sitting in the middle of his dorm room singing to himself seemed just a little too pathetic).

There _was_ snow, and going for a walk outside would have been a good idea--but at this point it was getting dark in preparation for the storm that was coming in. And anyway, that wasn't something he'd definitely be able to do every year; he didn't know where he'd end up living after college, but it might be somewhere with a warmer climate, where walks in the snow were out of the question. He needed something that would be there no matter where he went.

Then Feuilly thought back to the previous year's Christmas, to the hours he'd spent curled up on the lazy boy, immersed in his book, while his foster parents snored on the couch. It hadn't been anything exciting or special. But it had been quiet. And nice.

Feuilly had a few books out from the university library--a couple of nonfiction books and one of the young adult dystopia novels everyone had been talking about all fall; he decided on the novel, because it seemed like the easiest read. He made a mug of hot chocolate (the last packet in the box), and when he went to throw the box away he found a mini candy cane that he'd gotten at the bank the week before and forgotten about. Remembering the year he was eight and living with the Hoopers, he hung the candy on the edge of the mug to melt into the drink. They didn't have a couch in the dorm room, but Feuilly made his bed, propped up the pillows at the head of it, and spread his fleece blanket over it all. He gathered up his mug and his book and settled in for a nice long read. Hot chocolate and a book and nothing to do all afternoon: That would be his Christmas tradition.

"Merry Christmas," he said to himself, raising the mug in a toast.

Then he opened the book and let it carry him away.

 


	11. The Pawn

_Christmas, 4:35 pm_

_Nobody would know_ , he thought _. I could slip and fall and break my neck in the ditch and nobody would have any idea._

And immediately after _: Okay, that was morbid even for me._

It was true, though. And if it happened--if he got hurt or into trouble or whatever--it would be his own fault and probably serve him right. Not because he was out in a tempest that had half the state under a severe winter storm warning, but because he was the one who’d worked it out so neither his mom nor his dad knew where he actually was.

Although to be honest, wandering around a wooded area in the midst of a major ice storm was probably not the greatest idea either.

But how could you resist such a storm? The snow earlier in the day had been gorgeous, falling down in thick, lazy flakes, so thick the air seemed white with them, but this storm--the wind that howled above and wildly lashed the branches of the trees, the freezing rain that filled the air and stung the cheeks and coated everything with a thin layer of ice-- _this_ was Nature at its most awe-inspiring. The storm flung itself at him so violently that he had to lean into the wind, and he couldn’t tell whether it was rain falling or ice that was stinging his cheeks. He’d stopped being able to feel his legs some time ago, and his fingers were quickly going just as numb inside his mittens. The roads were entirely deserted, hidden under two inches of snow (and that was only what had fallen since they’d given up plowing anything but the major roads) with a heavy layer of ice on top of that, and the strangeness of walking right down the center of the road (because he’d already seen three or four big branches go down in the woods on either side of the road, and he wasn’t reckless enough to walk on the shoulder right next to the trees) only added to the otherworldliness of the scene.

There should be a song, or a poem, or something to go along with this _glorious_ day--or night, he supposed, since though it had been basically twilight for several hours now, it must be nearly five by this time and the darkness wasn't entirely due to the storm anymore. (There was _always_ a song or a poem to match everything, he could always feel them just at the edges of his awareness, but he could almost never find just the right one. He liked to think it was because it existed, and he just hadn’t come across it yet or didn’t remember it.) He recited a few lines of some of some of the wildest, stormiest poetry he could thing of, but none of it matched the raw power of the storm, the way the wind was flinging ice crystals in his face, the creaking of trees as they whipped around, unseen, above him--and he ended up just throwing back his head and yelling,

But then he found himself quoting another snow poem (was it the thought of night coming on that brought it to mind?) It was a very different one:

_Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast_

_In a field I looked into going past,_

_And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,_

_But a few weeds and stubble showing last._

He picked his way around a big branch (or maybe part of a small tree) that lay across the road. The silent beginning-of-a-storm snowfall in the Frost poem was nothing like the fierce, _loud_ , storm that raged overhead--and yet it seemed right for some reason, touching part of the thing inside him that always ached to catch the right words or tune to match the moment. And so he continued reciting, his voice so low that he could barely hear the words under the noise of the wind, but _tasting_ them, true and real, on his tongue.

_The woods around it have it - it is theirs._

_All animals are smothered in their lairs._

_I am too absent-spirited to count;_

_The loneliness includes me unawares._

  


_And lonely as it is, that loneliness_

_Will be more lonely ere it will be less -_

_A blanker whiteness of benighted snow_

_With no expression, nothing to express._

  


_They cannot scare me with their empty spaces_

_Between stars - on stars where no human race is._

_I have it in me so much nearer home_

_To scare myself with my own desert places._

Ah. That was it. A tree creaked threateningly overhead and Jehan moved away, but his attention had been dragged away from the storm now, sucked into his own internal desert places.

He felt . . . all mixed up inside. Hurt. Angry. Numb. Some combination of the three that was all of them and none of them at the same time, so that he couldn't even label what he felt--and Jehan _hated_ not being able to put a name to his feelings. He liked strong, complicated emotions _so muc_ _h_ in literature and movies and video games, but in real life they were much more uncomfortable.

Jehan kicked at the snow in frustration; it yielded unsatisfyingly, and so he kicked one of the fallen branches, sending jabs of pain up from his numb foot. It was all so _cliche_. The "broken home." The fight over the kids--or in this case, the one kid. The remarriages and the step-siblings and all of a sudden both halves of his home full of people who weren't his people, both his parents busy with families that weren't his family. He belonged in one of those cheesy pamphlets the school counselor had given him back when the divorce went through; he could be the cover photo, the quietly uncomfortable kid with hunched shoulders and a worried grimace.

They were still fighting over him--Thanksgiving had been a mess, trying to figure out whose house he'd go to, with wheedling phone calls and passive-aggressive emails saying how much they missed him and how he should feel absolutely free to spend the holiday wherever he felt most comfortable. And then, when he'd chosen his mom's house, there'd been a school concert for the twins and the toddler had an ear infection and Steve had been busy planning an elaborate and disastrous snowshoeing trip and his mom had barely had two conversations with him all weekend. (Not unlike fall break with his dad and his step-brothers.)

So with Christmas on the horizon, Jehan had taken the passive-aggressive offense, equivocating about his plans, delaying committing to attendance at one household or another, pushing to see . . . he wasn't sure what, exactly. How far they'd let him go, what he could get away with. Whether they'd care.

And they pulled at him and hinted and fought for his allegiance and when Winter Break rolled around both of them assumed that he was with the other one.

He'd talked with his dad the evening before, and he asked with fake jollity how his mom was doing; his mom had called that afternoon and inquired, stiffly polite, about his father. Jehan had answered vaguely and they'd been satisfied with that, just as they'd been satisfied with his vague description of how he'd been spending his break and his noncommittal response about what he might do for New Year's. He'd been surprised at how easy it was to pull it off.

He hadn't even needed to lie.

So now his dad thought he was with his mom, and his mom thought he was with his dad, and if a tree fell on him and crushed him, nobody would know for days, if not weeks. Jehan kicked at another branch, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets. His eyes were stinging, and he was torn between wanting to give in to the tears and not wanting to admit that his parents' games had hurt him that deeply.

 _Don't let them win,_ he told himself, raising his head to the blowing snow. _If you spend the whole holiday feeling sorry for yourself, how do you come out as anything but the victim in this? Go back to your dorm; eat some dinner; finish reading that novel. You say you're your own person, not controlled by their games; prove it--by enjoying yourself this evening._

Jehan turned around and began the long trek back up the road, toward the faint glow of the campus on the hillside above him. The snow was falling thicker than ever, densely filling the halos of orange light around the streetlights, and already his tracks were filling up with snow. The storm was still _amazing_ , the wild beauty of the snow and the wind and the night filling Jehan's soul with a fierce joy, despite everything that was wrong--but his warm dorm room _was_ starting to sound pretty nice as well. _Besides,_ he told himself as he picked his way around fallen trees, _it_ is _important to be sensible and take care of yourself. Especially if nobody else is._

No sooner had the thought crossed his mind, than all the lights--both the streetlights around him and the more distant lights of the university he was heading toward--went out.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jehan's poem is Desert Places, by Robert Frost.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking on through all the angst! Here is where it turns the corner. :)

_Christmas, 5:02 pm_

Feuilly had made it through two chapters of his novel and was just starting to get attached to the characters when the lights flickered, then snapped out.

He sat up, waited in the pitch blackness to see if they would come back on. When they didn't, he closed the book and laid it on the bed, then groped his way over to the window. He could see nothing outside; the gentle orangish glow of streetlights reflecting off snow that had filled the air minutes earlier was gone, and everything was dark. He couldn't see any light in any direction. Of course, he didn't have a particularly wide view from this little window on the back side of the dorm building.

Carefully, Feuilly shuffled across his room (tripping over three or four things he'd forgotten were on the floor on the way and barking his shins against the crossbar on his roommate's desk chair) and felt along the wall until he located the door handle. He slowly walked down the hallway, dragging one hand along the wall, and around the corner to where two more windows looked out in the other direction.

He could feel the cold seeping through the glass. But that was all; there was no light visible on this side of the building, either. Ordinarily, the view was the downward slope of the hill the dorm sat on top of, with private homes scattered through the woods, and farther away, the downtown area. If there were lights on anywhere, Feuilly would have been able to see them. Whatever this was, it had hit more than just the university.

Which meant it likely wouldn't be fixed for quite some time. With a sigh, Feuilly turned to make his way back to his room. He wasn't sleepy yet, but with the power out and no light source, there really wasn't much for him to do but go to bed. It was that or sit in the darkness and lament the derailment of his Christmas tradition in its very first year--and Feuilly had learned that dwelling on things usually didn't end well for him.

As he shuffled his way back toward his room, hands out in front of him like a zombie, he thought he heard a sound from down the hallway. He stopped, listening, and was almost convinced he'd imagined it . . . when he heard it again, louder this time. Someone was crying.

Feuilly stumbled down the hall toward the sound, moving as fast as he dared, hands outstretched in front of him.

"Hello?" he called tentatively. "Are you okay?" Just then, he ran into a wall where he hadn't expected there to be one--and by the time he'd reoriented himself, he realized that if there'd been an answer, he'd missed it. But he could still hear the muffled sobs, so he continued down the hallway toward them.

The crying was coming from the lounge, the one with the stolen DVD player. As Feuilly rounded the corner, he could hear the person sniffling loudly, sounding entirely miserable.

"Um . . . sorry, but, are you all right?" he asked.

There was a muffled yelp. "Wh-who's there?"

"I'm Feuilly . . . I live down the hall? Sorry to scare you, I just--I heard someone . . . that is, I heard a weird sound, and . . . is everything okay?"

"No," the person said, his voice cracking on the word. "I mean, yeah, everything's fine. It's--it's silly."

Feuilly carefully took a few steps forward, then yelped in pain as his toes connected with a piece of furniture.

"Oh god, sorry--I moved the tables around," the person said. A second later, a groping hand connected with Feuilly's arm and guided him to the side. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Feuilly gritted out between clenched teeth. "But are you okay? What's up?"

"It's silly," the guy said again, but the tears were back in his voice. "I just. I was making Christmas cookies. Because my mom and I used to make them when I was little. I went out to the grocery store in the beginning of a blizzard to get all this stuff, and I had just cut them out and then the power went out and now I can't bake them and I--"

He choked back a sob. "It's so stupid, it's just cookies. But. I really was trying to focus on the good memories. Beause she died when I was fifteen, and that's why I'm not home, 'cause my dad isn't home, and--" He broke off, sniffling loudly. "Sorry. Um, yeah. That's why I'm crying over raw cookies."

"Wow," Feuilly said slowly. "I'm so sorry. That must be really, really hard." He'd been kind of a mess when he'd learned his mother had died, back when he was about twelve. But that was different; he hadn't seen her in six years, she hadn't cared enough to get it together so she could keep him. Baking cookies together . . . it seemed like this kid's mother had really loved him.

"I'm really sorry," he said again. "Is . . . is there anything I can do?" It sounded stupid the moment it came out of his mouth--of course there wasn't anything he could do; the guy's mom was _dead_ , what was he going to do to make that better?--and he wished he could take it back, thankful for the darkness hiding his face.

But the guy just sniffled again and said. "I--I could really use a hug. Um, if that's not weird."

"S-sure." Feuilly held out his arms blindly, and a groping hand found his wrist. A moment later, a short person had flung his arms around him, pressing his face into Feuilly's shoulder. Awkwardly, Feuilly hugged him back. His arms were too long and he didn't know what to do with his hands (Should he rub his shoulders? Pat his back? Just squeeze? What were the rules of hugs? Did any rules apply when you were hugging a stranger whose face you'd never even seen?)--but the other person was warm and a little chubby and such a nice, comfortable hugger that Feuilly almost forgot the awkwardness of the situation.

The person in his arms finally heaved a long sigh and pulled away. "Thanks," he said, ". . . Feuilly, right?"

"Yeah," Feuilly said. "And you are . . . um?"

"Oh my god," the stranger laughed. "I didn't even tell you my name! And you just went along with it and gave me a hug anyway, and--" His laughter was a little creaky, as if he was still blinking away tears, but it was anything but forced. "My name's Courfeyrac. I live on the second floor; I came down here to use your oven because somebody melted a plastic plate in ours."

"People," Feuilly sighed.

"Yeah, I know."

"So . . . the power's probably going to be out for a while," Feuilly said. "I looked out the front of the building and there's no light in the town at all, that I can see. So, do you maybe want some help packing up your cookie dough? You can save it and bake it another day, whenever the power goes back on."

"I don't know . . . it's got raw eggs in it," Courfeyrac said. "It's probably not supposed to go unrefrigerated for that long."

"What about if you pack it in snow?"

"Yeah . . . yeah, that would work! And I've got a cooler in my room, so I don't have to just leave it sitting out in the snow." Courfeyrac stood up, and Feuilly could hear the rustle of plastic wrap . . . and then the clatter of a cookie sheet falling. "Um. Maybe we should get a light."

A moment later, the bluish light of a phone screen illuminated Courfeyrac's face. "Do you have a flashlight?" Feuilly asked. "If the power's going to be out a while, it's probably best to save the battery as much as you can."

"Oh, good point." Courfeyrac let the screen flicker out. "I don't have a flashlight--but there are some other people left on my floor; I'm sure someone must have one. Do you think I can trade future cookies for present light?"

They went up to the second floor, and Feuilly trailed behind Courfeyrac as he called down the hallway, "Hey! Is anyone here?"

There was a long pause, then somewhere behind them a door clicked. "Um . . . hello?" someone called tentatively, and a beam of yellow light shone down the hallway. Feuilly turned, squinting; after so long in darkness even the relatively dim flashlight hurt his eyes. Behind the light, he could see the faint outline of a person bundled up in several layers of sweaters. The light glinted off his glasses.

"Oh my god, you're a life saver!" Courfeyrac exclaimed. "Neither of us owns a flashlight, great adults we are, right?"

The stranger shrugged awkwardly. "It's not something you need often," he said. His voice had a faint Indian accent.

"But when you need one, you _really_ need it," Courfeyrac agreed. "Speaking of which . . . would you mind lending us your light  for a few minutes? I _may_ have just knocked a whole tray full of gingerbread cookies on the floor of the first-floor lounge. And it's kind of hard to clean up that kind of thing in the dark."

"Of course you can borrow it."

"Awesome; thank you _so_ much!" Courfeyrac said. "Just let me run down to my room and grab my cooler so I can put the rest of the dough away. It'll be just one second!"

"Here, take the light," the student called after him. Courfeyrac darted back to get it, then bounced off, leaving Feuilly and the owner of the flashlight standing in silence in the dark.

"Um . . . hi. My name's Feuilly."

"Pleased to meet you. I'm Combeferre."

Feuilly considered trying for a handshake, but decided it wasn't worth the awkwardness of groping around in the darkness. "So . . . what year are you?" he asked instead.

"I'm a junior, majoring in biology and premed--you?"

"Freshman," Feuilly said. "I'm studying engineering."

"What kind of engineering?"

"I haven't officially declared my concentration yet, but it will probably be civil engineering," Feuilly said. "Or mechanical engineering, maybe. The core classes are the same either way."

"And why did you pick engineering?" Combeferre asked. "Any particular reason?"

"Well, I . . . I like the thought of creating something that will last," Feuilly said. "Bridges and roads and things that people will still be using years and years from now. I--uh, I sort of wanted to be an architect. But so many people want to go into that, and you have to be good at design, so I was worried it wasn't maybe the smartest choice, so--um, yeah. Engineering."

"I like that--making things that will last," Combeferre said. "Like the Roman roads. Or the Incan walls in Cusco."

"The Incan walls?"

"Yes, they built these amazing walls in the city from huge boulders, some of them the size of a car or bigger, without any mortar, just by measuring and fitting them incredibly precisely. And they're still so closely fit together that you can't even get a knife blade between them in a lot of the joints."

"That's really interesting; when was this?'

"I don't remember exactly; it was back in the pre-Columbian era. And the Incan empire didn't have a system of writing, of course, so no one really knows how they did it."

"You know a lot about this stuff . . . I thought you said your major was premed."

"I . . . did a lot of reading, as a kid," Combeferre said sheepishly. "I had a phase when I wanted to be an archaeologist, around when I was ten or so."

"So, what other fun facts did you learn?"

"Sorry," Combeferre mumbled. "I sometimes substitute random trivia for making actual conversation. It's annoying, I know."

"No, I'm serious," Feuilly insisted. "I really like this stuff--and we don't do anything like this in my engineering classes. What other cool ancient buildings did you learn about?"

"Well . . ." Combeferre said slowly. "There's this bridge in Turkey--the Caravan bridge, it's called. It was built in 850 B.C.E., but it's still in use today; they drive cars over it and everything. It might be the oldest bridge still in use, it sort of depends on how you count it. Because there's also . . ."

By the time Courfeyrac returned, juggling flashlight and cooler and a cardboard box and apologizing for taking so long, Combeferre had moved on to the architecture of ancient China. Courfeyrac jumped in seamlessly, asking questions Feuilly wouldn't have thought to ask and making comparisons to the art history class he'd taken that fall. The conversation continued all the way down to the lounge, through the cleanup of the fallen gingerbread men.

And then they kept talking, settling down on the lounge's battered couches. It wasn't a consciously made decision--but Feuilly, for his part, didn't really want to go back to his empty room. And it seemed like the other two felt the same. After all, without power, what did they have to go back to? Courfeyrac had his memories of his dead mother; Feuilly had his lack of meaningful memories. And Combeferre . . . Feuilly didn't know what baggage  _he_ was carrying around--but once he relaxed into the conversation, he started talking at a mile a minute, as if he hadn't spoken to anyone in a week.

They moved on from ancient architecture to gender roles in ancient civilizations and modern societies, and from there to political involvement in the United States, by the way of the X-men franchise, somehow. Courfeyrac lay sprawled over one of the couches, his feet dangling off one end; Combeferre had the flashlight and was idly clicking the light on and off as he talked. Feuilly didn't talk a lot, but he listened intently, mentally setting aside key ideas to learn more about later--and thinking that  _this_ was what he'd expected college to be.

"Hey, are we telling scary stories?"

Feuilly jumped, and Combeferre actually let out a little yelp of surprise. The person leaning against the doorway to the lounge was so big that Feuilly was surprised he'd crept up on them like that.

"Nah," Courfeyrac said, entirely nonplussed. "We're just talking about Republicans."

"Like I said, scary stories." The guy flopped onto one of the couches. "All right if I join?"

"Of course," Combeferre said.

"We're getting back to our roots," Courfeyrac said. "Huddled around our one meager light source, telling stories of the history of our people to ward off the darkness."

"You want candles?" the newcomer said, sitting up. "I've got, like, twenty candles, man."

"I thought we weren't allowed to have--" Feuilly started, before catching himself in the freshman moment and shutting up.

But the big guy just laughed. "Come on, help me carry them down."

 


	13. Chapter 13

Bossuet's feet were blocks of ice, and he didn't have any feeling left in his fingers, and the blowing sleet stung his face--but ahead of him was the entrance to the university campus, with its promise of a hot shower and maybe some dinner, and he slogged a  _little_ bit faster through the shin-deep snow.

Christmas Day and a blizzard forecast had made for a strange combination of people at the grocery store that day--frazzled hosts running in for forgotten cheesecloth or wine or crab rangoon mixed with people frantically stocking up on bread and milk and bottled water. And Bossuet had worked twelve hours of it, because three more people had called in "sick" that afternoon, probably due to the weather. With the storm coming (and the entire bread section cleaned out anyway), they'd closed up an hour earlier than planned, but Bossuet was still exhausted.

He was weighing the relative merits of going straight to bed and eating dinner first when all the lights in the town went out.

Bossuet sighed and rearranged his expectations for Christmas yet again. A hot shower wasn't that important, after all; nor was supper. Getting inside would be nice. And maybe dry socks.

If he could find his dorm.

He groped his way over to the hedge that marched along the entrance road, figuring he could follow it up to the entrance. (And from there . . . well, he would handle that when the time came.) They were farther back from the road than Bossuet had remembered, and by the time he had the springy branches safely under his hands he was in snow up to his knees and completely disoriented. He stopped for a minute to remeber which side of the road he was on, so he could figure out which direction he should follow the hedges in.

A pair of headlights turned into the driveway to campus, blinding even at that distance in the absence of any other light. Bossuet squinted, then staggered back to the road to wave the car down.

Even with the vehicle taking it slow on the slick roads, it took Bossuet too long to push through the snow to the road, and the car coasted past him just as he made it to the sidewalk, eyes flashing with afterimages from the headlights. He tried his hardest to shove down the wave of disappointment that washed over him. It would be okay. It would've been nice to get a ride, but he didn't need it, he would be--

Then the car slowed. And stopped. Bossuet could have cried.

The door opened and a college-age guy called out, "Are you okay?"

"Y-yeah," Bossuet called back. "Just . . . c-c-could I get a ride?"

"On to campus?"

"Yeah. I live in Parker."

"Sure. Get in."

Bossuet tried to brush the worst of the snow off himself before climbing into the guy's car, but with how fast it was coming down, it was kind of a losing battle, and the guy eventually rolled down the window to tell him to not worry about it and just get inside.

"I don't care about the car anyway, it's my parents'," he said, as he slowly set off up the road again. "So, you're a student here?"

Bossuet nodded. "P-p-pre-law," he managed between chattering teeth. "Y-you?"

"Political science." The guy glanced over at him, then reached over the crank the heat up to full blast. "My name's Enjolras."

"I'm Bossuet."

"Why were you out walking in this?" Enjolras asked as he carefully made the sharp left that led to Parker. "It's kind of dangerous out here."

"M-my car's in the sh-shop, and I had to work," Bossuet explained.

"On Christmas? Where do you work?"

"T-t-tops."

"Ah," Enjolras said. He pulled up carefully. "Here you go. Get warm, okay?"

"Y-yeah. Thanks." Bossuet got out of the car. His rescuer pulled back a little, turning so that the headlights lit up the sidewalk to the door, and Bossuet waved another thanks. He slogged up the sidewalk, fumbled his card out of his pocket (dropping it twice), and ran it through the card swipe.

Nothing.

But of course. The power was out, so the card swipes wouldn't work. He was locked out. Futilely, Bossuet tugged on the door. It was firmly locked.

He was laughing, although he wasn't sure why because at this point it was really  _not_ funny. He stepped back from the door and sank down to sit on the steps, his head in his hands. Apparently, even dry socks was too much to hope for tonight.

"Hey.  _ Bossuet."  _ Bossuet looked up to see Enjolras standing in front of him, his teeth chattering. "Are you okay?"

"I'm locked out." Bossuet laughed, but it was almost a whimper. "The power's out."

Enjolras strode past him and started knocking on the door, shouting, "Hello? Hello?"

"It's no good," Bossuet groaned. "There's no one there. I'm the only one still on campus in the whole dorm; I did a tour of the hall last night."

"Okay," Enjolras said, undaunted. "Security. They've got to be able to let you in. Is there a phone number to call?" He looked around for posted information.

"Nine-nine-nine from any campus phone," Bossuet answered automatically. "--but I guess that doesn't do much good, with the power out."

"There's an 800 number," Enjolras said. "I don't know it, but I know it exists." He paused, frowning, looking around as if the darkened campus was bound to give up its secrets. Bossuet dropped his head into his hands again.

"Look," Enjolras said, crouching down next to Bossuet, "why don't you come back to my dorm with me? There are other people there, surely someone knows the number. And you can borrow some dry clothes. You don't . . . I kind of think it would be good if you got inside. Like, soon."

"Um," said Bossuet, realizing that he had stopped shivering, and maybe that was a problem. "Yeah. That might be good."

When they got to the other dorm, they faced the same situation--the whole building was dark, and the door only opened with a card swipe. And this time, there was someone else in the same predicament.

Enjolras's mouth fell open as the light from his cell phone shone on the student's face. "You again?"

The kid's big, dark eyes were miserable. "I just came out to see if I could see any light in the town," he explained. "I have my card with me and everything. I just forgot about the locks not working without electricity." He hugged his arms around himself. "I tried knocking, but nobody answered."

"I'll try again," Enjolras said. He went up to the door and started pounding on it, adding a few kicks against the metal part along the bottom for good measure. Nothing.

"Hi, I'm Bossuet," Bossuet said, offering his hand to the other locked-out student. It seemed right; if you were going to be locked out for hours with someone, you should at least know their name.

"I'm Marius." Marius either ignored or didn't see Bossuet's hand (but it was dark, of course he didn't), and turned back toward the racket that was Enjolras still working on the door. "Do you know anyone who's still here? Can we call them to let us in?"

"Everyone I know is gone."

"Me too," Marius said sadly.

Enjolras stopped knocking to blow on his hands. "Okay, well. I have my car. If worst comes to worst, we can go to an all-night diner or a hotel or something."

"I--uh--don't have my wallet with me," Marius said.

"Don't worry about it," Enjolras said breezily. "I've got it."

Bossuet's eye was caught by something overhead. He took a few steps back and stared up into the darkness, but there was nothing. Were his eyes playing tricks on him? He kept looking, if for no other reason than that the snowflakes falling on his eyes felt really weird.

"Is it safe to drive?" Marius was asking.

"I just drove here and I was fine," Enjolras said challengingly, but then his voice softened. "No, the roads aren't great, but it's safer than standing out here and getting hypothermia. You're not even wearing a hat."

"I didn't think I'd be out here more than a few minutes."

There it was again. It took a minute to click, then Bossuet realized what he was seeing: the skittering beam of a flashlight.

"Hey--hey guys," he said. His tongue was slow and tripped over itself. "There's a light."

Enjolras was beside him. "Are you okay?"

"There's a light," Bossuet said again, clearer. "Up there."

"There is!" Marius exclaimed.

"Hey!" Enjolras shouted. "Hey, can you hear me? We're locked out!"

"They won't hear you all the way up there," Maruis said. "But wait--do you have your cell phone?"

"Yes, why?"

"The room phones are landlines--they'll still work with the power out."

"Do you know their number?"

"It's right above the front door, so it's either a thirty-one or a thirty-three," Marius said. "And it looks like it's on the fourth floor? Maybe the third."

"The fourth, I think," Enjolras said. He pulled out his phone. "What's the campus number to put first?"

Marius rattled it off, and Enjolras quickly dialed. The dial tone sounded three times, then there was a click and Bossuet could hear a very confused voice say "Hello?"

"Hey," Enjolras said quickly. "We're locked out of the dorm, because the card swipes don't work. Could you . . . " The other person said something quick and inaudible, and Enjolras answered, "Yeah, the front door. Thanks!"

A minute later, they saw the wobbling light of a flashlight come down the hall, and a pale kid with messy hair and dark bags under his eyes opened the door.

"Thank you so much," Marius said, hurrying inside and stomping the snow from his boots.

"You all got locked out? Man, that sucks. I didn't think anyone was out in that mess."

"Some people have to work, even on Christmas," Enjolras pointed out, a little sharply, as he shook the snow out of his scarf. "And _some_ people have nowhere to go."

"Jesus, okay, I just meant." The kid who'd let them in shrugged broadly and didn't finish the sentence.

After so long in the cold, the warmth of the lobby felt weird, distant, as if Bossuet's fingers and toes and face had just resigned themselves to an eternity of freezing. For some reason, he started to shiver again, his hands shaking wildly as he tried to brush the snow off his coat. Was that normal, shivering after you got inside? He couldn't remember.

"Are you okay?" Enjolras was holding onto his elbow; Bossuet wasn't sure why.

"Y-y-y-yeah." His teeth were chattering like mad.

"Okay, we need to get you some dry clothes," Enjolras said.

"He's about my size," Marius offered. "I live on the third floor; maybe it'd be quicker if I just ran up to my room and grabbed some stuff. Could I, um, borrow the light?"

"Sure, no problem," the guy with the flashlight said, handing it over. "What's wrong with him?" he asked, as Marius took off.

"I'm worried about hypothermia," Enjolras said, at the same time as Bossuet slurred, "N-n-nothing, I'm f-f-fine."

"He walked all the way back from Tops."

"'s-s not th-that far."

The other student whistled. "Wow. Um. I have an ungodly number of fleece blankets, if that's something that would be helpful?"

"Thanks," Enjolras said. "That would be great."

"Okay, cool. Sit tight; I'll be right back."

"Don't you want to wait for the flashlight?"

"Nah, I've stubbed my toes on all the shit in my room enough times to know where it all is. Or if not--well, my toes are used to it."

A few minutes later, Marius returned, his arms full of sweatpants and sweaters and a skinny Hispanic kid in his wake. "Guys, this is Joly; he lives on my floor and he's in premed," Marius announced. "I just ran into him--I didn't realize he was still here too."

"I'm just in my first year," Joly said hesitantly, "so I don't know how much help I can actually be. But, um, I'll do my best." He turned toward Bossuet. "So the symptoms of mild hypothermia include dizziness, mild confusion, loss of coordination, nausea--also hunger, how weird is that--and, um, elevated heart rate. There's a couple others but those are the ones I remember."

"I d-d-d-don't have hypothermia," Bossuet insisted. "Really, I'm f-f-fine."

Joly just squinted at him. "A lack of concern about one's condition can be a symptom of moderate to severe hypothermia."

Bossuet started back for a minute, then burst out laughing. "So anyone who d-d-doesn't think they have it p-p-p-probably d-does?"

Joly's grin twitched nervously. "Okay, maybe you are fine. But dry clothes would be a good idea either way, right?"

"I think there's a bathroom down the hall," Marius suggested. "Do you want to take the light?"

Just then, Grantaire came back, his arms full of blankets. "Hey, um, if you don't want to stand around in the dark, there's some people down in the lounge. They've got candles and stuff."

 


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to TRY to finish it this year, I really am. <3

Grantaire wouldn't admit it even to himself, but he was a little bit glad the power had gone out. Granted, the kids hanging out in the dorm lounge were (despite somehow being screwed-up or -over enough to have nowhere to go for winter break) not the kind of people who usually liked Grantaire. You had Combeferre, an international student who'd been talking about moral epistomology like a professor but who was apparently a bio-premed double major; Enjolras, who was prelaw and who'd spent Christmas day volunteering at a homeless shelter; and Marius, who was apparently fluent in three different languages. Then there were your sporty types (Bahorel could probably bench press a couch--with Grantaire on it--one-handed, and Feuilly apparently biked everywhere) and Courfeyrac and Joly, who were so overdramatic and annoyingly cheerful they were probably theater kids. Grantaire didn't belong there at all.

But it was better than sitting in his room in the dark by himself.

And when the subject turned from Kant's categorical imperative to evolution and the more unlikely theories as to why the dinosaurs went extinct, he found himself enjoying the conversation in spite of himself.

They were sitting on (and sprawling out over, and perching on the arms of) the big beat-up couches of the first-floor lounge. A bunch of candles in a mix of colors and scents (everything from "jasmine night" to "pot roast") were set out on a battered coffee table in the middle, making the whole thing look just a little like some kind of seance or secret society meeting. One of the couches was half hidden under a pile of fleece blankets and bedspreads, under which Bahorel and Courfeyrac were attempting to raise Bossuet's body temperature with cuddling and tons of blankets.

Apparently, it wasn't working: "You're still shivering," Feuilly pointed out in a lull in the conversation, after they'd been talking for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes.

"I'm f-f-f-fine," Bossuet said again from somewhere under the mound of blankets on the big couch. He was more lucid than when they'd first come inside, Grantaire had to admit, but he still couldn't suppress the chattering of his teeth.

"Is there anything else we can do?" Enjolras asked Joly. "Other than bringing down more blankets."

"Well, drinking something hot is usually a good way to raise body temperature, I think," Joly said, glancing at Combeferre for confirmation. "But we don't really have any way to do that."

"Could we heat water over the candles?" Grantaire asked. "I don't know, that'd probably take, like, all night for half a cup of water." He could almost see the calculations start behind Combeferre's glasses.

"Let's build a fire!" Courfeyrac suggested. "Out in the courtyard, under the overhang of the second story--you know, back behind the dorm. It's sheltered enough back there that I think we could get it going."

"What are you going to burn?" Combeferre asked.

"Um . . . we all have a copy of the student handbook, right?" Courfeyrac paused halfway through struggling out from under the heap of comforters. "But I guess we'd need wood to make a really useful fire." He deflated back into the blankets. "Never mind."

But Bahorel sat up excitedly. "There's all that furniture in the basement dumpster."

"There's a dumpster in the basement?"

"Yeah, in the sub-basement, down where the furnace is. There's a whole dumpster full of old desks and chairs and shit that they're just throwing away--which is disgusting, really, you know there's schools and shelters and places that could _use_ them."

"We have a sub-basement?" Grantaire asked. "How the hell do you know that?"

Bahorel just smiled mysteriously, but Marius piped up, "Yeah, we do." Everyone turned to him and he flushed. "I, um, did some exploring my first few weeks here. Just so I would know where things were, in case--I don't know, in case I needed to know."

"Okay then!" Courfeyrac wriggled the rest of the way out of the blanket heap. "Lead the way, Marius!"

Leaving Joly and Combeferre to lend their body heat to Bossuet, the rest of the students trooped down the deserted stairwell to the eerie sub-basement, where a large dumpster backed up to a service entrace held a huge assortment of discarded furniture. They carried up four chairs and a desk (picking obviously broken or stained furniture, because Enjolras had connections at a homeless shelter and he and Feuilly had already started talking about who in the university administration they should contact to try to get the useable furniture donated; by now they were probably drafting a letter), and Bahorel ran up to his room to get his axe (of _course_ he had an axe, Grantaire wasn't even surprised anymore).

They dragged the furniture out into the courtyard, cleared out a decent space by kicking and pushing the snow to the side (because, of course, none of them owned a snow shovel; they owned axes and nerf guns and probably an inflatable raft somewhere among them, but nothing practical and adult like a shovel), and set to work. They ended up tipping the desk over and using it as the firepit. Bahorel and Grantaire smashed up the chairs while Courfeyrac gleefully shredded up a semester's worth of marked-up statistics homework. Then they went through nearly a box of matches trying to get the paper to light and stay lit, with Courfeyrac lighting match after match and laughing wildly every time the wind blew them out, while Bahorel and Grantaire loomed over him, holding their coats spread out like the wings of great brooding birds.

Finally, they got the fire to stay lit, then to accept bigger and bigger shards of desk chair, until they had a nice blaze going inside their poor flipped-over desk. Courfeyrac ran back inside to get water and a pot they could put over the fire while Bahorel and Grantaire tried to figure out a way to prop the thing up over the flames. They had just rigged up something that _looked_ like it might work when Bahorel stopped, tipping his head to the sky like a dog scenting game.

"Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"Someone singing."

Unable to tell whether Bahorel was being serious or playing some weird, awkward kind of joke, Grantaire just shook his head. But Bahorel stood up and moved slowly toward the edge of the courtyard, his head cocked to one side. Grantaire trailed hesitantly after him, still unsure whether he was being played.

Then he heard it too. Very faintly, somewhere out in the night, someone was singing. Singing Christmas carols. Grantaire joined Bahorel at the short stone wall that bordered the courtyard, squinting out into the blowing snow and the darkness. From somewhere below them, the voice filtered up, faint but steady.

_"Adeste fideles, laeti triumphantes, venite, venite in Bethlehem."_

Bahorel's face lit up. He bounded to the top of the wall and, spreading his arms out, he sang into the wind at the top of his lungs:

_"Natum videte, regem angelorum! Venite adoremus, venite adoremus!"_

The answer came back, a little closer than before: _"Venite adoremus, dominum."_

Bahorel grinned and lauched into the second verse. Grantaire ran back to the fire for the flashlight, then shone it down onto the dark hillside below, swinging it from side to side like a searchlight. Just as Bahorel was finishing the third chorus of the carol, the light fell on a skinny figure staggering up through the snow. The person waved a mittened hand and trudged up toward Grantaire's light. Together, Bahorel and Grantaire pulled him up over the wall.

"You have a fire!" the kid exclaimed, letting the song drop. There was something familiar about him, although Grantaire couldn't pin it down--had they had a class together? Maybe Western Civ, the huge nine am. seminar that he'd slept through two mornings a week.

"Here, come on over and get warm," Bahorel said. "Although really you might be better off inside. We have a cuddle puddle going--or at least, we did, and I'm sure they'd be happy to start it up again for you."

"Why were you out in the storm?" Grantaire asked, a little cautiously, after the taking-down he'd had the last time he'd tried to express sympathy for someone caught out in nasty weather.

"There was a storm," the kid said, which didn't answer anything, but Bahorel nodded as if he understood. "Is the power out all over campus?"

"All over town, we think," Bahorel said. "Hence the fire. We're returning to our primitive roots."

The kid nodded soberly. "Within hours, the traditional boundaries of society will break down. Civilization as we know it will collapse."

"We're going to start eating each other," Grantaire contributed. "Putting our elbows on the table and using the wrong fork to do it."

"But listen, if you're going to be on our team for the impending snowpocalypse, we should know each other's names," Bahorel said. "I'm Bahorel, and this is Grantaire."

"Jehan."

"Hey, don't I know you?" Grantaire said, squinting at Jehan's face in the shifting orange firelight. "Yeah--you live on my floor! The triple on the end, by the bathroom, right?"

"With Chad and Dave, yeah."

"I _thought_ there was someone else still on the floor--but I didn't see you around at all today. I wondered where you were."

For some reason, a small grin broke across the kid's face--the first time he'd really smiled since stumbling into their circle of firelight. "I've been around. I have a weird sleep schedule, I guess."

"Well listen," Bahorel said, "you should get inside, before you freeze to death out here. We're doing hot chocolate, if we can ever rig up something to boil water."

Jehan shrugged. "I'm fine out here. It's warm by the fire. And I'm not done admiring this storm yet. Isn't it amazing? It makes me want to, I don't know, jump naked into a lake, or run into battle, or shout into the wind at the top of my lungs."

Bahorel grinned. "Same."

"I have a cousin who goes to school downstate," Grantaire offered, "and they do this thing every finals week--or like, the Sunday before finals, or something--where everyone just opens their dorm windows at midnight and they just all scream for one minute . . . it's supposed to be cathartic, I guess--a way of releasing pent-up exam stress and tension and just general bad feelings."

Bahorel's eyes glinted. "It's been a hell of a day."

"It's been a hell of a year," Jehan said, with feeling.

"Same," Grantaire and Bahorel said, in unison.

 


	15. Chapter 15

They'd eaten the soup on Christmas Eve, so that left cup-o-noodles for dinner on Christmas. Eponine was kicking herself for it--she should've held off, saved the nice thing for later instead of just using it up right away. This was why she was always pulling all-nighters, finishing her Spanish workbook in class while the profesora was coming around to collect them; she was stuck in the present, she had no long-term planning. Probably something about growing up never knowing was would come next had made her unable to make long-term plans. Probably she'd be sabotaging herself this way her whole life, ending up with nothing but shitty leftovers on Christmas night.

It had been a long, awkward day. It was hard enough to sleep two to a twin bed when you really liked the person you were sharing with; when she woke up at nine o'clock with her sister's elbow in her back, Eponine quickly gave up on relaxing enough to drift off again and just got up. Azelma slept in until eleven, while Eponine perched at her desk listening to CDs from the library, balancing her Walkman on her knees at just the right angle so it didn't skip too badly.

There was nothing to do. It was freezing and snowy outside, they had no money or good winter clothes, and everything was closed for the holiday anyway. They went down to the lounge and watched some old Christmas movies, fuzzy black-and-white things with green and fuchsia bleeding in from the margins of the old TV screen. Azelma took an hour-long shower so hot the whole bathroom was full of steam when Eponine went in to pee. They went down to the dorm computer lab and Eponine logged into one of the PCs for Azelma so she could check her facebook; Eponine found herself playing game after game of solitaire, an endlessly losing battle against nobody.

It was almost a relief when evening came--proving that, despite all appearances to the contrary, time really was passing--and it was time to eat a meal. Eponine pulled out her bin of food and handed Azelma a shrimp-flavor cup-o-noodles; Azelma shook her head.

"Can I have a chicken one?"

"I thought these were your favorite?"

"When I was, like, six." Azelma shrugged. "I just liked that they were pink."

"Oh." Eponine took back the styrofoam cup and handed her one with orange printing. She got out two forks from her stash of silverware stolen from the snack bar, and her one mug, and they went up the hall to the floor kitchen.

The mug of water for the first batch of noodles had been in the ancient, creaky microwave for only thirty seconds when all the lights went out.

"Shit." Eponine opened the microwave and felt around inside for the mug.

"Is it hot yet?"

She stuck one finger in the water. "Not really. Kind of lukewarm. You can have it if you want; I don't know how well it's going to cook the noodles, though."

She could almost hear Azelma's shrug in her voice. "Ehh, I'll pass."

They picked their way back up the hallway to Ep's room and set the abandoned food on her desk. With no power--no light, no computers to waste time on, to TV to watch--there was _really_ nothing to do. The room was very dark, and every time she had to cross it, Eponine was irrationally afraid she'd forget where the furniture was (three beds, three desks, three dressers; it wasn't that hard) and run into something.

"Well, I'm going to bed, I guess," Azelma said.

"Yeah, I guess."

There was something about the power being off that sent chills down Eponine's spine--even though she knew that logically the room wasn't getting colder, not noticeably at least; it would eventually, but it took a big cinderblock building a lot longer to cool down than a flimsy little trailer. She found herself scooting closer to Azelma, pressing her back against her sister's. Somewhere deep in the night outside, a car alarm went off.

"I'm sorry this is such a shitty Christmas," Eponine mumbled.

Azelma laughed shortly. "How is this shitty, compared to home?"

"At least we always had electricity on Christmas," Eponine sighed. "I mean, we lost it other times. But never on Christmas, right?"

"And it was too loud and too bright and there were always a million people coming over and Gav always had some _stupid_ toy that made noise and he just ran around annoying everybody while they all got drunker and drunker until--" Azelma broke off. She didn't need to finish the sentence; Eponine remembered that night too.

"It's quiet here," Azelma murmured, shifting a little closer to Eponine. "I like it."

"It's not always this quiet. When all the students are around, the dorms can get pretty noisy. And there are _so many_ drunk kids. But . . . it's better, yeah."

Azelma sighed. "Ugh, one week until school starts again. I don't want to go back."

"Just three more years," Eponine said. "Just make it through high school, and then it's college and you're away from them."

Azelma laughed again, loud and humorless. "I'm not going to college, Ep."

"But--"

"You're the one who gets what you want--if nobody's going to give it to you, you take it. I'm not like that."

"Is it the money you're worried about? There's scholarships, and work-study, and stuff; you can make it work--"

The pillow rustled as Azelma shook her head. "It's not just the money--it's all of it. Everything."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm failing tenth grade," Azelma said. "I never got algebra, and now they're trying to make us do geometry, and world civ is all essays and I'm crap at those. They don't give you scholarships if you can't even get into college.

"And--well, what's the point, anyway? Working overtime and weekends to save up the money, and staying up late studying, and living on ramen and peanut butter . . . if I want to get out of that house, I'm better off finding some guy to get me pregnant so I can guilt him into getting us an apartment. It's a lot less work, and my chances are probably better."

Eponine stared blankly into the pitch blackness of the room, the silence heavy after her sister finished. She opened her mouth, then closed it again without saying anything. She hated it, but Azelma was probably right. There was a part of her--this new person she pretended to be as she filled notebooks with tiny handwriting and printed out her semester schedule to hang on the corkboard over her desk--that wanted to believe that anything was possible, that there were scholarships and tutoring programs and work-study grants to make college a possibility for any kid who was willing to put in the work. That things would work out, somehow.

But underneath the college kid who wrote papers and attended lectures and studied out on the quad on sunny days, Eponine was still the same skinny white-trash girl with stringy hair and bad teeth. And she knew that--while it might be true for the comfortable middle-class students, with their savings accounts and doctor fathers and AP credits, that she went to school with--things didn't always work out. Not for people like her and Azelma.

You got what you got, and sometimes the best you could do was to go to bed without dinner and try to ignore your rumbling stomach--and sometimes it was to find a guy to get you pregnant.

Tears stung her eyes, and she blinked hard--even though it was completely dark and nobody would see. Beside her, Azelma yawned and shifted, the springs of the old mattress creaking underneath them.

Without warning, someone started yelling outside, a wordless bellow that carried over the howling wind.

Azelma stiffened beside her. "What's that?"

"Drunk people," Eponine said, then remembering a time when drunk people were an actual danger and not just a nuisance, added, "stupid drunk kids, fooling around."

When another voice joined the first one, she sighed and got up to open the window. The air outside was icy and full of blowing snow, and shocked away any drowsiness she'd felt.

"Hey!" she yelled into the night. "People are trying to sleep!"

Then she noticed that there was light down below, coming from around the corner of the dorm--orange, flickering firelight. As she was wondering about this, a boy stepped out into the light.

"Sorry!" he called up. "It was catharsis--letting off steam from finals and Christmas and stuff. We didn't realize there were other people around still."

"Is setting things on fire part of your catharsis?" Eponine asked. What a combination--the power goes out _and_ the dorm burns down, on Christmas. It would be just her luck.

A bigger student appeared at the first one's elbow. "We're boiling water for hot chocolate," he shouted. "D'you want some? We've got plenty!"

Eponine hesitated. She didn't want to get involved in the antics of some bunch of rowdy college kids giddy with being on their own for the first time. On the other hand . . . her stomach gurgled at the thought of those cup-o-noodles she hadn't gotten to eat.

Azelma, padding up behind her, answered for her. "We'll be right down."

 

 


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it!! Thank you for reading (especially to anyone who's stuck with this story for the THREE years it took me to finish the darn thing o_O). I hope you all have good people around you today, however you're spending the day.

Eponine almost turned around the moment she walked into the lounge. There were almost a dozen strangers there, wrapped in blankets and sitting around a forest of candles like some bizzarre kind of cult. They were all male. They were talking earnestly about something (Eponine caught the words "appropriation" and "semiotics"), bent over a diagram in a textbook. A whole smorgasbord of food was spread out almost carelessly over one of the coffee tables--a fancy fruit basket with strawberries and bananas and a pineapple and a big red bow, a giant tin of three kinds of popcorn, plates of different kinds of cookies, six different kinds of tea in pretty boxes--as if it were nothing.

These weren't the kind of people she belonged with.

But the whole semester had been a story of smiling and nodding and pretending she knew what the hell people were talking about when they said "allocation of human and material capital" or "organize your thoughts by creating a mind map to represent the relationship between the elements before outlining your essay" or "my parents have a summer house in the Hamptons." She supposed she could pretend once more.

It wasn't that different from when she was seven and her father had stomped on her toes and pushed her around the corner of the rest area bathrooms toward the nice family having a picnic. She'd let the tears well up and whimpered her story about getting lost, and they'd cooed over her and shared their lunch; later on, when she'd given her father the smushed baloney sandwich and crushed potato chips she'd managed to hide in her pocket, he'd praised her for being so clever and getting so much out of those stupid rich people. There was a lot you could put up with, if you were hungry enough. (It was funny--she'd thought she was getting away from all of that when she got out of the house; now she spent every moment of every day pretending she belonged here.)

So she swallowed her pride and her discomfort and stepped forward. "Hi," she ventured. "The guys outside said something about hot chocolate?"

A small boy jumped up from the couch, tripping on the whorl of blankets he'd been half wrapped in. "Yes, welcome!" he said. "We're actually still working on the hot chocolate, it's taking the water a long time to boil. But come on in and have a seat--and help yourselves to snacks, we've got plenty!"

"Eponine?" someone asked. "I didn't know you were still on campus."

Eponine turned to see a the skinny redhead from her biology lab sitting on the floor, peering up at her. For some reason, she felt her face get hot.

"I didn't know _you_ were still on campus," she returned, although actually now that she thought about it, she remembered seeing Marius leaving the dorm a few days earlier.

"Um, yeah, I'm not really talking to my--" His face flushed. "Yeah, I'm still here."

"Well, we should hang out sometime," Eponine suggested. "My sister's here for a few days--oh yeah, this is my sister, Azelma."

"Nice to meet you," Marius said, and that started off a whole string of introductions that derailed whatever academic conversation the other students had been having, and somehow ended up with Eponine and Azelma on a couch with a fleece blanket tossed over their knees, balancing strawberries and handfuls of popcorn on paper towels.

Now that she took the time to look at them, Eponine realized she knew--or at least recognized--several of the people here. Courfeyrac had been one of the cheerleaders at the Powder Puff game at homecoming, and she'd seen Combeferre leaving the dorm early in the morning, around the same time she left for her first class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And she'd crossed paths with Feuilly in the laundry room several times over the semester; they were both among the small handful of students who did laundry on Friday nights. She hadn't realized so many people were still around.

Which brought up the question, _why_? She and Azelma had nowhere else to go, but why were all these kids spending Christmas in a dorm lounge? Didn't they have families and cars and ski lodges and whatever?

As Grantaire came in from the courtyard, stomping snow from his boots, Eponine heard a snatch of conversation from outside--Bahorel's voice, at his normal half-bellowing volume: "Nah, I'm _way_ too gay, and they're way too--". Bahorel--with his popped collar and navy blue pea coat and scarf that looked like silk--was someone who _definitely_ had a ski lodge or beach house or something, somewhere. But even rich people could be shitty to their kids. (Eponine's parents had been rich, once. She just barely remembered those days.) Eponine recalled what Marius had started to say--"I'm not really talking to my--" From comments she'd overheard in the bio lab, she could guess the word he'd left off was "grandfather."

She began to notice other things as well. The way Feuilly tracked the words in the textbook with his finger as he read. The fragile tension in Jehan's eyes. The threadbare places in the elbows of Joly's red sweater. The way Combeferre glanced around every time he stumbled over a word, as if to check whether anyone had noticed. Some of the food was expensive stuff, but the cookies were handmade, broken into a lot of little pieces on their trip. The packets of chips were And the fancy fruit basket . . . it was huge, and obviously expensive--but the tag on it had just one line of computer-printed text: "Season's Greetings from: Mother and Father."

Maybe some of these kids didn't belong, either--at college, or at home, or anywhere at all. Maybe nobody really did.

The wind brought in a whole cloud of snow as Bahorel flung the door open, announcing, "Hot water is ready!"

"Please, everyone, help yourself to the flavored ones," Enjolras urged. "I'd like to be able to be telling the truth for once when I tell my mother they were appreciated. She always forgets I don't like hot chocolate."

"Pass the cookies around again," Joly said.

"And the popcorn!"

"Careful with the--"

"Shit, sorry, I'll grab some paper towels."

"Could you shine a flashlight over here for a second?"

"Hey, can we do a thing my family used to do?" Courfeyrac asked, as the food-related commotion started to settle down. He leaned forward to look around the lopsided circle of couches, his red blanket slipping from his shoulders. "It was something my mom made us start doing when I was little. Me and my cousins, we'd always be really excited about presents, right? And then after we opened everything, we were--not disappointed, because they were great gifts and we weren't _that_ bratty. But we felt kind of . . . sad, because here was this thing we'd been looking forward to all year, and now it was over and we'd have to wait another three hundred and sixty-four days for another Christmas."

"The 'post-Christmas letdown,'" Bossuet said, nodding. "There's a Charlie Brown comic about it."

"We used to get pretty cranky," Courfeyrac recalled with a grin. "So one year my mom sat us down and made us all go around in a circle and name one really good thing we had--something that wasn't a Christmas present, but some part of the gift of just being alive--to help us remember how much we had to be grateful for even on ordinary days."

"Isn't that a Thanksgiving thing?" Grantaire asked.

Courfeyrac frowned. "I guess? Thanksgiving wasn't really a big thing in our house; my mom was Japanese, and--"

"I didn't get to go home for Thanksgiving either," Joly interrupted. "Let's do it."

"You start," Bahorel prompted him.

"Okay. Um. I guess . . . I'm really thankful for technology," Joly said. "Twenty years ago, I wouldn't have been able to talk to my parents and my siblings every day, and today that's possible, and that's a pretty cool thing about being alive today." He turned to Bossuet. "Your turn."

"I'm thankful for my mom," Bossuet said. "She's worked so hard and given up so much for her kids, and I'm just really blessed to have her in my life."

"The winter solstice was on Tuesday," Combeferre offered. "That means that every day the sun rises a little earlier and sets a little later. In the middle of winter, a few extra minutes of sunlight can be a priceless gift."

"I'm grateful for scholarships," Feuilly said, "and the chance to start again. And for opportunities that I never dreamed I'd have. And free public education for thirteen years! You don't realize what a gift that is until you start looking at college price tags. Just being able to read is a gift--there are seven hundred million people in the world who can't. And with the internet, and public libraries, reading unlocks a whole world's worth of knowledge; that's--" He broke off, laughing. "There's a lot of things to celebrate, I guess."

Bahorel stared up at the ceiling, thinking. "Music," he said finally. "Music can bring the past back, in a way, and it can connect you to people you miss, and--I mean, come on, can you even imagine living in a world without music? So that's what I pick."

"Does a roof over your head count as a gift?" Marius asked. "Because I think we take that for granted, until it's not guaranteed. And, well, I got locked out of the dorm twice today, and all I could think about was the people who didn't have anywhere to go inside. And how easily that could have been me."

"Poetry," Jehan said, from his spot on the floor at Marius's feet. "Because reading something that was written a hundred years ago but still says _exactly_ what you're feeling at that moment . . . it's like confirmation from the universe that you're okay, because someone else shares your thoughts. It makes you feel less alone."

"On that note," Enjolras said, "meeting people who think the same way as you and value the same things." His eyes flicked up at Combeferre, sitting across from him. "It's a rare thing, and I think we're really lucky, for these four years, to be surrounded by people who are here to learn about the world and who--many of them--are passionate about trying to figure out how to make it a better place. You don't find that kind of people everywhere."

"Aw shit, mine's like, really shallow," Grantaire said. "But I'm thankful that I have all my fingers? I had bit of an accident with a power saw earlier this semester, and I had to get eight stitches on my right hand--but I didn't lose anything? And I'm an art major, so that was like, a huge deal. So I guess that was, a reminder, kind of, that even everyday stuff like having thumbs is a gift?" He turned to look up at Azelma. "Next?"

"My sister," Azelma said. "Because it's good to have someone to tell you 'yes, our parents are absolutely batshit crazy.' Otherwise, you can start believing they're actually normal." Everyone laughed, and Azelma grinned, but her eyes were serious.

Eponine blinked hard. She'd been planning to say something generic and universal and insincere--good health or something. But in the face of Azelma's honesty, that felt like a shitty move.

So instead she said, "I'm grateful that I don't have to spend Christmas in my parents' house. Because they are really, _really_ shitty people. And as crappy as Christmas in a dorm is, it's better than being back there." A few people around the circle looked uncomfortable at her bluntness--but Enjolras and Feuilly were nodding, and there was a wry twist to Grantaire's smile that told her he understood.

Courfeyrac set down his mug of hot chocolate. "And my gift this year is people. Because people are so, _so_ awesome, and they can make life such a beautiful thing every day. And there are seven billion of us--so even if you lose the people you love, or if the people who should have been there for you aren't, or if you find yourself all alone . . . you can always find good people to step in and help you get through."

"Hear, hear," Bahorel said.

Courfeyrac beamed around at everyone, a little wetly. "Like a group of random strangers who not only will share their flashlights and hot chocolate and cookies with you, but are also willing to get all mushy and personal just to help you carry on a family tradition. Thank you--all of you--for making it feel like Christmas."


End file.
